Hans Krahe (7 February 1898 – 25 June 1965) was a German philologist and linguist, specializing over many decades in the Illyrian languages.

[2] Homer mentions a people in Asia Minor, the Paphlagonians, as from the Enetai province,[3] and a few hundred years later Herodotus refers to the Enetoi twice, once as Illyrian[4] and again as the occupants of the Adriatic sea.

Having the model of Illyrian in mind he assumed that together these elements represented the remnant of one archaic language.

In his later work Krahe substituted Julius Pokorny's Pan-Illyrian theory concerning the oldest European river names with that of Old European hydronymy, a network of names of water courses dating back to the Bronze Age and to a time before Indo-European languages had developed in central, northern and western Europe.

He found that these monosyllabic water names give a system which he called Alteuropäisch (Old European).