Europe's oldest language? Kalevi Wiik makes the argument that most of Europe may have spoken a proto Finno-Ugric language before the appearance of Indo-European speakers in the region. It's still controversial a few years after the paper was published (and likely always will be).

Modern European derivitives of the language in question are Hungarian, the Ugric branch's sole representative in Europe, (although it has relatives in central Asia), as well as the Finnic Finnish, Estonian, Karelian (which is considered by some to be a dialect of Finnish and not a separate language), Izhora and Veps (which are both disputed in language v. dialect and are nearly dead), Vod (which is dead), Liv (which is dead and doesn't Google well), and the Saami languages, which have about 10 dialects and a sufficiently different grammar and lexicon that it gets the "strange cousin" title.
posted on Jun 15, 2004 - View this thread

Czech linguist Bedrich Hrozny first identified Hittite in 1915. It's an extinct Indo-European language that I thought would be of limited interest when I mentioned it in a previous post. However, I've been urged to share some related links, like this one which explains why Hittite is a black sheep in the IE family, this one, which contrasts the phonetics of Hittite and its relatives, a morphology page with many examples in Hittite and a short description of the relationship between Hittite and Sanskrit. If you haven't gotten your fill, there's Translated Hittite texts
posted on Jul 29, 2003 - View this thread