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The Language of southern Scandinavia in the Bronze Age:
Fenno-Ugric, Baltic, Germanic, or ...? Claes-Christian Elert. He's not your average Joe but a Professor Emeritus in linguistics.
What's your opinion on this, Jaska?The absence of any great dialect split in the Germanic language spoken in Scandinavia and northern Germany at the time of the earliest written sources (ca. 200-500 A.D.) indicates strongly that a Germanic language has been spoken over such a large area for only a short time. The late Bronze Age (ca. 700 B.C.) was a time of cultural change when the language(s) spoken earlier may have been replaced by the Germanic language.
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On archeological, genetic and linguistic grounds the late Bronze Age language in Scandinavia could have been a Finnic or Baltic language (or both). However, from what can be inferred from parallels in history or ethnolinguistics a more complicated and varied pattern is the most likely one in subglacial Europe at the end of the Ice Age after tens of thousands of years of human settlement or, later, in Bronze Age Scandinavia, after 7-8 millennia. The better-known linguistic situation in early cultures, such as southern Europe and Anatolia in the first two millennia B.C., shows a complicated pattern of IE and non-IE languages together with languages with unknown relationship, most of them spoken over restricted areas, and often subject to swift change. This is true also about cultures of a similar level of development in many parts of the world. There is archeological evidence in Bronze Age Sweden of a tribal community which is not incompatible with this language pattern (Larsson 1986; Nordström 1992; Wigren 1987).
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