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Finnish is related only to Estonian, Hungarian and some minority languages
whose speakers are scattered across the north of Russia. But, Kalevi
Wiik argues, Finno-Ugrian languages may originally have been spoken
by the whole of northern Europe
There are currently three different major families of languages in
Europe: the Indo-Europeans, the Finno-Ugrians and the Basques. The
numbers of speakers are highly disproportionate: there are around
700 million speakers of Indo-European languages (about 97 per cent
of Europeans), about 22 million Finno-Ugrians (including the Hungarians,
Finns and Estonians, 3 per cent of the European total), and about
1.7 million Basques (0.2 per cent).
Relations between the families of languages
have long been changing in the sense that the proportion of speakers
of Indo-European languages has been growing at the expense of speakers
of the Finno-Ugrian and Basque languages. The same development has
affected the areas in which they are spoken: Indo-European areas have
grown while Finno-Ugrian and Basque areas have shrunk. The Indo-European
languages have forced the Finno-Ugrian and Basque languages into ever
more peripheral areas, the Finno-Ugrian languages toward the Arctic
Ocean and Basque toward the Pyrenees.
Over the millennia, in other words,
the areas in which the Finno-Ugrian and Basque languages are spoken
have shrunk, with areas favourable to farming been transferred into
the hands of speakers of Indo-European languages. The change has probably
always taken place (at least largely) in the same way as it does today:
speakers of the Finno-Ugrian and Basque languages have gradually changed
to Indo-European languages; in the process, the border between the
Finno-Ugrian languages and the Indo-European languages has, step by
step, moved northwards, while that between the Basque languages and
the Indo-European languages has shifted closer and closer to the Pyrenees.
This shifting of linguistic borders has not been the result of the
moving of populations, or migration. Rather, the history of populations
in northern and western Europe has been immobile, based more on cultural
and linguistic diffusion than on demic diffusion.
The initial shifts in the borders between
the Finno-Ugrian and Indo-European and the Basque and Indo-European
languages was caused by the spread of agriculture and animal husbandry.
Agriculture and animal husbandry were so much more effective as a
means of subsistence than hunting, fishing and gathering that the
hunter-fisher-gatherers willingly changed their system of livelihood
to agricultural and animal husbandry, at the same time switching from
their own languages to the Indo-European tongue of the farmers.
I shall present my understanding of
the development of the peoples and languages of northern Europe in
the millennia following the Ice Age with the help of four maps.
Map
1 depicts the climax of the Ice Age and the period that followed,
between 23,000 and 8,000 BC. During this glacial and postglacial period,
the periglacial zone contained plentiful biomass or food, since it
was able to support large numbers of large herd animals, including
mammoths, bison, bears, elk and wild horses. Because of their easy
sub-sistence, the peoples of the periglacial zone were the most successful
in Europe. As often happens with successful populations, the population
of the periglacial zone grew, its living areas expanded and began
to overlap. The most important result of this period was that integration
occurred within the periglacial zone. This concerned all levels, cultures,
genetics and languages. Previously relatively small and separate cultures,
genetic groups and language areas became more homogeneous, and their
areas coalesced into a more or less uniform periglacial zone. Essential
from the point of view of language was that, as a result of integration,
the periglacial zone developed into a linguistic zone in which neighbouring
populations were able to communicate with each other irrespective
of how different their languages had originally been: a chain of languages
or dialects developed that may be called Uralic. It is possible that
a corresponding growth and unification also occurred in western Europe.
There, the result was the area of the Basque languages.
There was, however, no corres-ponding
unification of populations and languages in the central and southern
zones of Europe: the peoples of this area represented, in the Ice
Age, less successful small-game hunters. This area remained variegated
in the old way, with smaller cultural, genetic and linguistic areas
than in the periglacial zone.
Accordingly, in the year 8,000 BC, Europe
had at least three large linguistic areas: the comparatively unified
area of Uralic languages (U), the western area of Basque languages
(B) and, in the centre and south of the continent, an area of many
unknown small languages (X).
It should be said that the genetically
unusual Sami population of northern Norway (who, during the Ice Age,
lived considerably further to the south on the North Sea continent),
belonged, according to my hypothesis, to the periglacial zone whose
languages, at least partially, unified. The unusual genetic quality
of these Sami is based on the fact that they had for a long time (perhaps
from about 10,000 to 3,000BC) been isolated in western and northern
Norway from other northern Europeans, and a series of genetic mutations
took place in them.
By 5,500 BC, agriculture and animal husbandry and, in their wake,
the Indo-European languages, had spread from the direction of Greece
into the entire central and southern part of Europe (see map
2). By now, in other words, the speakers of the small languages
of central and southern Europe had adopted agriculture and animal
husbandry and the Indo-European language. They spoke a number of Indo-European
dialects con-taining substrata from older small languages; in other
words, the Indo-European dialects were spoken with different accents
in different parts of central and southern Europe, and the differences
in contemporary Indo-European languages (for example Greek and Albanian)
are largely based on these. For example, the Germanic, Baltic, Slavic,
Celtic and Romance languages did not yet exist at this stage; their
future areas were still occupied by the Uralic and Basque languages.
Europe was thus now divided into three
in a new way (although the borders were to a large extent the same
as in map 1). The peoples of the northern area were hunter-fisher-gatherers
who spoke Finno-Ugrian languages and represented a genetically homogeneous
human type. They were formerly successful people who were now (with,
among other things, the extinction of many herd animals) among the
continent's least successful. The population were descendants of the
people who had lived in the area in the Ice Age. The peoples of the
western area were small-game hunters who spoke Basque languages and
perhaps formed, genetically, their own group. The subsistence of the
people of this area was not as good as that of the farmer-herdsmen.
The peoples of central and southern Europe were farmer-herdsmen who
spoke Indo-European languages and also represented a genetic group
of their own and had developed as a result of the mixing of peoples
from the south-east with local populations. Sub-sistence in the area
had previously consisted of small-game hunting, but it had been supplanted
(partly as a result of the arrival of new populations, partly as a
cultural change) by another subsistence system, farming and animal
husbandry. The people of the area had become the fortunates of their
continent, whose way of life and Indo-European language were eagerly
imitated in the northern and western parts of Europe.
The border between the farmer-herdsmen
and the hunter-fisher-gatherers was significant in many ways. It was
a border between completely different systems of subsistence, for
the farmers were food producers who were able to regulate their food
supply, while the hunters were food appropriators who were more at
the mercy of nature. It was a linguistic border which divided the
speakers of Indo-European languages of central and southern Europe
from the Uralic-speakers of the north and the Basque-speakers of the
west. And, finally, it was a border that delineated abrupt differences
in population density, for the density among food producers was between
100 and 150 times denser than among food appropriators.
Map
3 depicts the period between 5,500 and 3,000BC, when farming
and animal husbandry and the Indo-European languages have to some
extent spread among the hunter-fisher-gatherers of northern Europe.
A new intermediate zone has developed between the former central and
northern zones. This is formed by areas whose inhabitants have adopted
farming and animal husbandry and the Indo-European language. There
are three such areas, G, B and S, or the areas of the original Germanic,
Baltic and Slavic languages. A corresponding area also developed between
western and central/southern Europe: here, the Indo-European languages
and the Basque languages became intermixed, and the results included
the original Celtic and Iberian languages (from which the Romance
languages later developed). The map does not show separately the Indo-European
languages which developed in central and southern Europe in the period
before 5,500BC.
Map
4 shows the areas of the seven contemporary language groups.
These are the Finno-Ugrian, Basque, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Celtic
and Romance. Of these, four (Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Romance)
have spread farther than the areas in which they originated, while
three (Finno-Ugric, Basque and Celtic) have shrunk. Of the Germanic
languages, one, English, has spread to many continents (including
North America and Australia); of the Romance languages, Spanish and
Portuguese have spread to South America, and French to Africa, among
other places.
From the point of view of northern Europe,
the routes along which the Germanic, Baltic and Slavic languages have
spread northwards are of some importance; they are the channels of
Scandinavia, the Baltic countries and Russia. The following features
are typical of the contemporary Indo-European languages of the three
channels: the main dialect boundaries are horizontal, so that the
languages are often divided into northern and southern dialects. The
more northern the dialect, the stronger the Finno-Ugrian substrate.
Old Indo-European place-names survive in comparatively large numbers
in all the route-areas (although southern Scandinavia, Denmark and
northern Germany have not been very much studied in this respect).
Thus the area of Finno-Ugrian place-names extends, in Russia, from
at least the area of the ancient Merians to the area to the south
of Moscow, and possibly into the Ukraine. In the Baltic route-area,
Finno-Ugrian place-names extend into central Lithuania and possibly
Poland.
The Hungarians are a peculiar people
in that they live in central Europe but speak a Finno-Ugrian language.
Their peculiarity is based on the fact that they are the only speakers
of a Finno-Ugrian language who participated in the great migration
of the first millennium. The original home of the Hungarians is in
the central Urals (and thus in the broad Uralic-speaking peri-glacial
zone) and the Hungarians moved from here via the Black Sea to present-day
Hungary; their year of arrival is believed to have been AD 896.
In the foregoing, I have attempted to describe the birth and development
of the European peoples and their languages as briefly and graphically
as possible. The whole story can, in fact, be condensed into one sentence:
Once upon a time there was a northern
Europe of successful big-game hunters which unified into a zone of
Uralic languages; there followed a central and southern Europe of
successful farmers which first unified into an area of Indo-European
languages and then began to spread into northern Europe, thus giving
rise to an important 'intermediate zone' (the areas of the original
Germanic, Baltic and Slavic languages).
My approach can be considered new in
that I do not explain the birth of peoples and languages by claiming
that, at some time in past millennia, they migrated from the east
to their present-day locations. I do not, in other words, follow the
old principle of ex oriente lux or the Biblical idea of the
divine direction of a promised people to a promised land. I have attempted
to give a much more immobile and, in my opinion, simpler and more
natural, explanation for the birth of the northern European peoples
and languages: the peoples of northern Europe, whether they speak
Indo-European, Finno-Ugrian or Basque languages, are to a large extent
descendants of peoples who have lived there 'since the beginning of
time' (at least the Ice Age or soon after). The foundations of my
explanation are subsistence systems (parti-cularly the big-game hunting
which guaranteed survival in the Ice Age, and agriculture and animal
husbandry after 5,500 BC) and the changes from Finno-Ugrian to Indo-European
languages in the area of northern Indo-European languages (in the
intermediate zone of northern and central Europe). My hypothesis also
explains why the present-day populations of northern Europe are genetically
relatively homo-geneous, although languages of two different families
are spoken in the region.
New in my approach, in particular, is
that I do not see influences between the languages of northern Europe
as uni-directional, or Indo-European-centred and ask only how Indo-European
languages have influenced Finno-Ugrian ones. I also ask how and when
Finno-Ugrian languages have influenced Indo-European ones. My most
decisive claim is that the Germanic, Baltic and Slavic languages were
born under the influence of the Finno-Ugrian languages in the context
of a shift in language from Finno-Ugrian to Indo-European.
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