Insular Celtic languages are the group of Celtic languages spoken in Brittany, Great Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. All surviving Celtic languages are in the Insular group, including Breton, which is spoken on continental Europe in Brittany, France. The Continental Celtic languages, although once quite widely spoken in mainland Europe and in Anatolia, are extinct. Six Insular Celtic languages are extant (in all cases written and spoken) in two distinct groups: Brittonic (or Brythonic) languages: Breton, Cornish, and Welsh Goidelic languages: Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic Insular Celtic hypothesis The "Insular Celtic hypothesis" is a theory that they evolved together in those places, having a later common ancestor than any of the Continental Celtic languages such as Celtiberian, Gaulish, Galatian and Lepontic, among others, all of which are long extinct. The proponents of the hypothesis (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) point to shared innovations among these – chiefly: inflected prepositions shared use of certain verbal particles VSO word order differentiation of absolute and conjunct verb endings as found extensively in Old Irish and less so in Middle Welsh (see Morphology of the Proto-Celtic language). The proponents assert that a strong partition between the Brittonic languages with Gaulish (P-Celtic) on one side and the Goidelic languages with Celtiberian (Q-Celtic) on the other, may be superficial, owing to a language contact phenomenon. They add the identical sound shift ( to ) could have occurred independently in the predecessors of Gaulish and Brittonic, or have spread through language contact between those two groups. Further, the Italic languages had a similar divergence between Latino-Faliscan, which kept , and Osco-Umbrian, which changed it to . Some historians, such as George Buchanan in the 16th century, had suggested the Brythonic or P-Celtic language was a descendant of the Picts' language. Indeed the tribe of the Pritani has Qritani (and, orthographically orthodox in modern form but counterintuitively written Cruthin) (Q-Celtic) cognate forms. The family tree of the Insular Celtic languages is thus as follows: This table lists cognates showing the development of Proto-Celtic to in Gaulish and the Brittonic languages but to in the Goidelic languages. In Welsh orthography denotes or A significant difference between Goidelic and Brittonic languages is the transformation of , to a denasalised vowel with lengthening, é, before an originally voiceless stop or fricative, Old Irish "death", "fish hook", "tooth", "hundred" vs. Welsh , , ,