Pre-Indo-European languages of Europe that are still actively used today

HaiHooey:

Indo-European migration started roughly 6000 years ago, the absolute majority of indigenous European languages and ethnicities disappeared or got assimilated. Languages on the map existed before Indo-European migration and somehow survived till this day.

The Basque language is definitely the strangest, as nobody was able to classify it as a part of any other language family. Thus, the Basque language is called "Language isolate".

Kartvelian is the indigenous language family of the Caucasus, besides Georgian, there are also other Kartvelian languages like Svan, Megrelian, and Laz, spoken mostly in different regions of Western Georgia.

Circassian is the indigenous language family of the Caucasus, it divides into 2 distinctive languages of Western Circassian - Adyghe and Eastern Circassian - Kabardian. It is mostly replaced with Russian today, but a few hundred years ago, before the Circassian genocide, it was the language of almost the whole of North-Western Caucasus.

Vainakh is also the indigenous language of the Caucasus, it is the language of Chechen and Ingush people who are Vainakh people. There is a large degree of mutual intelligibility and shared vocabulary, creating a Nakh branch of the Eastern Caucasian languages.

Dagestan is a treasure box of languages, if Chechen and Ingush share one branch of North-East Caucasian languages, there are 6 more branches within Dagestan. Avar, Lezgic, Tsezic, Lak, Dargic, and Khinalug. Avar and Lezgic are by far the most used, while others might have around 3 to 5 thousand speakers.

I am not sure about the survival of Basque, but Caucasian languages are diverse and survived because of mountains and many valleys that divided tribes for decades and centuries and defended against big players in the region. This is why classifying these languages as Caucasian is just a regional grouping of these languages, not the actual language families. There are similarities that are expected as these people were neighbors forever, but there are major differences as well which restricts the classification of these languages as one language family, so grouping by region is the only option.

Edit: Also, I am more of a historian, than a mapmaker, so I know it's not the best lol

Edit N2: Nobody wants to read comments, but also everybody wants to write comments, awesome lol

Collection: languages - Tags: europe, languages - Source: reddit.com