The Atlantic languages of Semitic or "Semitidic" (para-Semitic) origin are a disputed concept in historical linguistics put forward by Theo Vennemann.
He proposed that Semitic-language-speakers occupied regions in Europe thousands of years ago and influenced the later European languages that are not part of the Semitic family.
He considered some toponyms on the Atlantic coast to be neither Vasconic nor Indo-European, but to have derived from languages that were related to the Mediterranean Hamito-Semitic group.
A key factor was the dominant verb-initial word order in Insular Celtic, compared to other Indo-European languages, together with lexical correspondences.
In summary, Sheynin concludes "that [Vennemann] failed in this book not only as comparative linguist, or etymologist, but even in his narrow specialization as a Germanist....
Since there are no Phoenician inscriptions in Britain, if traders visited the island, the Insular Celtic part of the theory depended on linguistic evidence.