Georgiev who proposed "Daco-Mysian" as the ancestral language of Albanian, considered it to be a separate language from Thracian. From a "genealogical standpoint", Messapic is the closest at least partially attested language to Albanian. Hyllested & Joseph (2022) label this Albanian-Messapic branch as Illyric and in agreement with recent bibliography identify Greco-Phrygian as the IE branch closest to the Albanian-Messapic one. These two branches form an areal grouping - which is often called "Balkan IE" - with Armenian. The two broader main linguistic groupings which have been proposed as ancestral variants of Albanian are Illyrian and Thracian. The Illyrian linguistic theory has some consensus, but Illyrian language is too little attested for definite comparisons to be made. Further issues are linked to the definitions of "Illyrian" and "Thracian" which are vague and aren't applied to the same areas which were considered to be part of Illyria and Thrace in antiquity. In contemporary research, two main onomastic provinces have been defined in which Illyrian personal names occur; the southern Illyrian or south-eastern Dalmatian province (Albania, Montenegro and their hinterland) and the central Illyrian or middle Dalmatian-Pannonian province (parts of Croatia, Bosnia and western Serbia). The region of the Dardani (modern Kosovo, parts of northern North Macedonia, parts of eastern Serbia) saw the overlap of the southern/south-eastern, Dalmatian and local anthroponymy. A third area around modern Slovenia sometimes considered part of Illyria in antiquity is considered to have been closer to Venetic. Eric Hamp distanced categorization of Albanian from particular historical groupings and their unresolved issues and treated it as a separate undocumented Paleo-Balkan language for the purpose of research clarity. As such, in recent decades it has become preferable to treat historical languages like Illyrian and Thracian and existing ones like Albanian as separate branches within the Indo-European family. There is a debate on whether the Illyrian language was a centum or a satem language. It is also uncertain whether Illyrians spoke a homogeneous language or rather a collection of different but related languages that were wrongly considered the same language by ancient writers. The Venetic tribes, formerly considered Illyrian, are no longer considered categorised with Illyrians.> The same is sometimes said of the Thracian language. For example, based on the toponyms and other lexical items, Thracian and Dacian were probably different but related languages. Albanian shows traces of satemization within the Indo-European language tree, however the majority of Albanologists hold