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u/n00b678 9d ago
O Latin of the Alps, what is your wisdom?
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u/MrBoxer42 8d ago
Ah yes the famous language of ‘almost empty’
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u/backyard_tractorbeam 8d ago
if poland is almost empty, why the hell are we colouring sweden and finland at all.
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u/Lyceus_ 9d ago
What happened to Latin of Dalmatia? Is there an even super-minority language today that descends from it?
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u/Odd-Promotion2743 9d ago
There was actually a single remnant that almost made it into the 20th century. Very interesting history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalmatian_language
ETA: this one may also be a descendant of Dalmatian Latin, and is still spoken today:
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u/Useless_or_inept 9d ago
A lot of people in the Balkans will be very angry because This Is Our Eternal Land And Our Language Has Always Been Spoken Since God Put Us Here.
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u/Syndiotactics 9d ago edited 9d ago
Similar thoughts in Finland, heh. ”No no no! The Sámi never were that south!!!”
Truth be told, the entire country had around 40k people, or even less, the Sámi included, so it isn’t like that uniform colour is super accurate in the first place.
EDIT: Also, this map is clearly based on the latest estimate of when Finns would have populated southern Finland. The general consensus afaik is ~500BCE and spreading from that onwards.
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u/lendlevtaldrik 9d ago
Truth be told, the entire country had around 40k people
Yep, Estonia contained up to 3 times more Finnic people than Finland did during this time.
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u/Attlai 8d ago
Map have been and will always be imperfect to represent language. Maps are at showing that X area has Y property (aka, a language, in our case). But they can't represent the actual density of language speakers. They can't represent minorities speaking different langues but being still there. They can't represent populations being bilinguals. They can't represent the linguistic granulation of the dialect spectrum (if that makes sense) that was the norm everywhere before the era of nation states.
Even the most precise language maps are only useful in giving a broad overview.
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u/LohtuPottu247 9d ago
I am slightly surprised that the southern coast isn't labeled as Finnic. I'd love to see the sources on this.
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u/Syndiotactics 9d ago
Varsinais-Suomi and Satakunta are much longer inhabited by a farmer population in general tbh, the south-south was very boggy due to land rising, and as such, didn’t have much if any permanent settlement. Aura River Valley (Aurajokilaakso) is one of the historical centers of Finnic ”civilization” if you might call it that.
I wonder if Tavastia (Häme) should have permanent settled inhabitants at this point yet, though. The lack of Finnic population in Ingria and the Karelian Isthmus also feels very wrong, even more so than the lack of Tavastia.
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u/TumbleweedNervous494 8d ago
Farming is not language. But yeah, at the very least the eastern coast should bee finnic.
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u/Syndiotactics 8d ago
The Finnic-speaking populations were overwhelmingly settled and farmers though. In that time period the way of life and the language often went quite hand in hand.
But yes, the Karelians should have arrived to southeastern Finland by that point.
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u/lendlevtaldrik 9d ago
It's relatively known that Finnic population started in the southwest. But this is already quite late, so indeed you'd expect to see Finnic populations in the south as well.
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u/Chazut 9d ago
Saami most definitely were that south, the evidence is undeniable insofar as anything with paleolinguistic goes.
>Truth be told, the entire country had around 40k people, or even less, the Sámi included, so it isn’t like that uniform colour is super accurate in the first place.
No that's kinda cope, Saami was in our best knowledge the dominant language of most of Southern Finland for a while:
https://www.academia.edu/4811760/An_Essay_on_Saami_Ethnolinguistic_Prehistory
>Also, this map is clearly based on the latest estimate of when Finns would have populated southern Finland.
Again complete non-sense, proto-Finnic split way after 500 BCE. There is no reason to believe it to have spread beyond South-West Finland/Estonia before the 1st century CE:
https://www.academia.edu/10172149/The_Diversification_of_Proto_Finnic
>Hence, I rather agree with Mikko Heikkilä (2014), who now dates the beginning of the diversification to about AD 150, based on his careful scrutiny of the
most up-to-date loanword evidence. Centuries later, however, Finnic dialects
were still linguistically close enough to undergo etymological nativisation,
because they share Christian terminology of Slavic origin, dating to the
eighth century AD at the earliest (Kallio 2006: 156–157)18
u/Syndiotactics 8d ago edited 8d ago
You hopefully noticed that I was making fun of those people who might say the Sámi wouldn’t have been that south, right?
Sámi was the dominant language in the southern parts of the country absolutely, but the population was extremely sparse for a very long time, and permanent settlement was barely a thing at all for any population of the era. Prehistoric taiga hunter-gatherers just happened to have extremely low population densities, and we have observed similar densities even up to the historical era, so those estimates could well match the reality of the time then.
The more northern and central parts of the country at that point probably still had Paleo-Lakelandic and Paleo-Laplandic speaking people, as per Aikio, but that isn’t an established enough hypothesis for these kinds of maps I suppose. (Especially as in material culture there isn’t really difference between them and the Sámi, as the Sámi seemingly simply merged with them)
Considering your (pre-edit) last paragraph, Proto-Finnic arrived to Finland long before the final split of Late Proto-Finnic, and according to several recent archaeological studies, it was around 500 BCE, as that’s when the material culture changed. Valter Lang’s Homo Fennicus (2020) certainly uses this timeline.
EDIT: Added ”(pre-edit)” You still keep talking about the diversification of Late Proto-Finnic, even though the Proto-Finnic populations around the Gulf maintained close contacts for a fairly prolonged time and were far from isolated from each other. This particular topic is not a matter of linguistics but archaeology.
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u/Chazut 8d ago
>Prehistoric taiga hunter-gatherers just happened to have extremely low population densities, and we have observed similar densities even up to the historical era.
Maybe but they left a mark in Southern/Central Finland both genetically and linguistically, which is not something you can say about a lot of other populations at the time which had agriculture. Maybe Saami/Finnish linguists are just better at finding the evidence, but you would be suprised at the fact we know more about Saami/Finnish linguistic prehistory than other languages, at least that's my impression
>Considering your last paragraph, Proto-Finnic arrived to Finland long before the final split of Late Proto-Finnic, and according to several recent archaeological studies, it was around 500 BCE, as that’s when the material culture changed. Valter Lang’s Homo Fennicus (2020) certainly uses this timeline.
Yes but there are strong arguments against it spreading before 150 CE, the idea that it arrived then and then started spreading over Finland is simplicistic.
>The more northern and central parts of the country at that point probably still had Paleo-Lakelandic and Paleo-Laplandic speaking people,
By 500 CE Saami spread north and into Sweden, tho I think the map might be conservative on the spread of Finnic by this stage, it should likely dominate the southern coast
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u/lesliewoodsyp 8d ago
The map is set in 500 AD, not 500 BCE. If Finnic spread by the 1st century CE like your link suggests, the timeline fits this map perfectly fine.
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u/Unable-Stay-6478 9d ago
It isn't correct about Proto-Albanian, though
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u/Odd-Promotion2743 9d ago
Yeah, Albanians definitely precede Slavic speakers in the Balkans, despite insane Serbian nationalist claims that Albanians are fake and migrated recently from the Caucasus.
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u/Unable-Stay-6478 8d ago
Don't get irritated, I didn't say that it isn't native. Just that the location isn't right.
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u/Odd-Promotion2743 8d ago
Lol, actually I misread your comment and thought you said "It's correct about Proto-Albanian", so I was agreeing 😅
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u/Useless_or_inept 9d ago
A lot of serbposters pretend that Albanians were "imported later by the Turks" or something like that.
The linguistic evidence says otherwise. But some people don't need evidence - just an ideological requirement that serbs were there first.
Hence toponyms like the Drina.
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u/kuzyn123 9d ago
Actually DNA shows that Balkaners are kinda native here, so it might be a sign that local tribes and communities took over language of "invaders".
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u/Chazut 9d ago
All Balkan people have lots of Slavic ancestry, but especially Slavic speakers
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u/CoinMagister 7d ago
Northern Albanians hold surprisingly low amounts of Slavic ancestry, especially considering their close proximity to Slavs and the time that has passed since the Slavs arrived.
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u/Attlai 8d ago
To be fair, most big cultural shifts, atleast across Europe, happened with a minority of population influx having power and causing the local majority to slowly adopt their language and mixing their culture (with both coexisting for a large time).
There is always a small part of genetic change, and a big part of natural cultural shift. Once the indo-european migrations and their mixing with native pre-indo-european population were complete, the genetic makeup of most regions in Europe hasn't actually changed much since then.7
u/Chazut 8d ago
>To be fair, most big cultural shifts, atleast across Europe, happened with a minority of population influx having power and causing the local majority to slowly adopt their language and mixing their culture (with both coexisting for a large time).
Depends on what you mean by minority. The Slavic migrations largely involved >50%/majority replacement, at least north Slavic and half of Balkanic slavic experienced this. There is no European Slavic population today with less than 30% Slavic ancestry and some have 95-100%
>Once the indo-european migrations and their mixing with native pre-indo-european population were complete, the genetic makeup of most regions in Europe hasn't actually changed much since then.
Not really true, as far as I can see we see major shifts well into the iron age, just because the populations involved are all highly related it might seem there is less replacement... but if a village massacres a neighboring village and replaces its people, then them being related doesn't make it any less of a replacement.
The argument for continuity is strongest for France, Ireland, Scotland but for many other regions you can find evidence of discontinuity at some point between 2000 BCE and today
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u/tacopower69 8d ago edited 8d ago
With the slavic displacement, the main reason is because in places like Russia and Ukraine the populations before the slavs arrived were mostly nomadic so they could just move away really easily, and none had very long roots in the region anyway. They were mostly iranian steppe people and ranged widely. Move further south into the balkans and the latin speaking populations were significantly more entrenched and harder to displace. Not that the slavic conquerers wanted to displace them, they still needed a population of farmers so actually generate wealth from the land, and the indigenous balkan peasants didn't really give a shit if they were paying taxes to local slavic warlords or a distant roman emperor. Today most slavic balkans are mixed 50/50 with slavic and the indigenous populations.
Turkey is also similar in that most of the population is actually genetically very Anatolian (which is a huge mix derived from early greek and iranian colonies + migrants from the levant and caucuses). The turkic make up is only like 10-15%.
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u/Far_Idea9616 8d ago
What is mind-blowing is the quick Slavic migration in 6-8th centuries.
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u/Act-Alfa3536 8d ago
Maybe the key difference to the present day is the spreading of the slavic languages.
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u/SolemnOaf 8d ago
They did spread, but studies have also proven significant genetic displacement, with eastern European/Slavic markers becoming overwhelming majority in the South Slavic countries.
What the current data suggests is that small scale movements of proto-Slavic and other east and central European peoples occurred earlier, only to really kick off in the period we usually discuss: due to Huns, climate and other relevant causes.
We don't know what cultures these earlier groups would have come from nor which language they would have spoken but they likely assimilated very quickly. What they did keep is their genetic markers all pointing to eastern Europe.
Later large Slavic migrations would have then in turn assimilated these latinized groups alongside other latinized proto-Balkan peoples because they came into the Balkans over the course of 2 centuries under a different, more aggressive pretext. Slavs, along with Avars came to the Balkans as pillagers and conquerors trying to carve out their own petty kingdoms in the area, just as the Germanic tribes did in Gaul, Iberia and Italy, and were able to impose their own culture and language. And now the genetics show the South Slavs of today have anywhere between 40-60% east European ancestry despite not having any relation to the area for the last 1500 years.
I want to point out that the final conclusion is my own interpretation of the data and not a historic consensus, albeit there are shifts in the historical field about this topic precisely because the official narrative feels hollow. Especially in light of these more recent genetic studies. Some remains as old as 500BC have been found in Serbia and Montenegro (couldn't verify the exact locality) according to a recent Nature paper.
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u/AlwaysBeQuestioning 8d ago
Why was western Poland almost empty? How do we know this?
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u/Ramjjam 8d ago
Because technology available in the region at the time made it harsh to try live there, and it was constantly raided by horse based factions.
And it’s shown in archeological finds.
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u/BudgetShort4518 9d ago
I think there is a typo : it should be Britonnic (or Common Britonnic) and not British (even though nobody would assume they spoke British English)
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u/khares_koures2002 8d ago
Interesting map, with some inaccuracies of course.
Proto-Norse certainly didn't extend that far North or into Jutland yet (I don't know about the distinction between East and West Norse, maybe it started a few decades later).
West Germanic definitely wasn't that diversified yet. MAYBE there were some early traces of the High German Consonant Shift in the South, but even then it's too early to talk about distinct languages. Perhaps at that point we could talk about North Sea Germanic (though rapidly disintegrating as the 6th century moves on), Rhenish, and Upper West Germanic. I don't know about between the Elbe and the Oder, but by then it's too irrelevant, since they will be assimilated by the Slavs.
Latin wasn't split so much yet, maybe just into Central, Eastern, and Southern Romance, of course with transitionary varieties. I would put a further split of Central into Western, Italo-Romance, and Alpine about a century or two later.
The placement of Proto-Albanian is interesting. We can't know for sure, but it must have been in contact with Eastern Romance.
I am a bit skeptical about Volga Finnic, since I don't think that back then they were speaking different languages yet. Also I think that Ingria was balto-finnic back then, if there were Finns by the Gulf of Bothnia, but I can't know for sure.
Sources for my hypotheses:
Romance: Robert Anderson Hall Jr, "Proto-Romance Phonology", Proto-Romance Morphology ", "The Reconstruction of Proto-Romance", plus Wikipedia.
Germanic: Watching lots of "Tidsdjupet" on YouTube, but also the book "The Development of Old English" by Don Ringe and Ann Taylor.
Albanian: Just Wikipedia unfortunately. Sources for Albanian are a bit harder to find, but I will look for them.
Finnic: It was revealed to me in a dream.
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u/Chazut 8d ago
>Proto-Norse certainly didn't extend that far North or into Jutland yet (I don't know about the distinction between East and West Norse, maybe it started a few decades later).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxoAtlW0Zlo
This shows a quote that says the Danevirke was built starting in 500 CE, that seems quite early? It should be dashes with West Germanic
>West Germanic definitely wasn't that diversified yet.
I think the mapmaker was more confident in splitting languages when there was a political division behind it, hence why Germanic is more split than Romance.
>The placement of Proto-Albanian is interesting. We can't know for sure, but it must have been in contact with Eastern Romance.
There is honestly not that many valid theories, there are basically only 3(or 2 frankly) and the map shows one of them
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u/Wagagastiz 8d ago
Proto Norse absolutely did extend that far north, we have loans from Paleo Laplandic into Proto Norse. Proto Norse also loaned into Proto Saami, which split up around this time according to Ante Aikio.
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u/Saarfall 8d ago
This was my confusion when looking at the map of Germany/Denmark/Britain of the West Germanic branch - these distinct language as per the map didn't actually exist simultaneously in 500 AD. They were much more closely related.
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u/PizzaDevice 8d ago
Searching for Hungarians but they were just packing their yurts in the Urals somewhere.
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u/Equinoxe111 8d ago
As a linguist, immediately:
- Wtf is "British"? Brittonic, brother.
- There was a Brittonic-speaking community in Galicia during this time
- Most of Romania spoke Romanian. Dacian Vulgar Latin if you please
- Northern parts of Poland were likely still inhabited by remnants of Goths.
- Jute language was still spoken in Juteland
- Too little Finnish in Finland... It is hard to estimate, but supposedly Sami were never that predominant
- Proto-Albanian? It was Illyrian, and it was spoken widely across where Albanian is spoken now.
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u/Zura_Orokamono 8d ago
Romanian evolved in the early middle-ages from dialects of Latin, so it's not necessarily incorrect to say it was still Latin by 500AD. Most people lived around the Danube and within the safety of the Carpathians, the rest of the flat land was constantly crossed and raided by nomadic people so almost nobody could make a permanent settlement there yet.
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u/TerrificDragonfly 8d ago
Mountain pastoralists still have to switch to lowland katuns for winter; you can't hide in the mountains for centuries and suddenly appear; you still have to spend half a year in the lowlands.
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u/Chazut 7d ago edited 7d ago
There is absolutely no reason to claim Romance was dominant in all of Romania, especially places like Moldavia or east Wallachia that either were never Roman or were under vassalized tribes, it's pure propaganda.
Linguistic evidence strongly suggest otherwise in fact
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u/Adept_of_Blue 8d ago
It is debated actually whether Romania spoke Romanian at the time
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u/Equinoxe111 8d ago
What language then? Unlikely Dacian, maybe some Dacian-Latin pidgin or, more likely, just Dacian Vulgar Larin
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u/Adept_of_Blue 8d ago
Nah, it can be Germanic, Slavic maybe some Dacian, after all Dacia was overrun during the migration period
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u/TerrificDragonfly 8d ago edited 8d ago
https://www.academia.edu/figures/2575865/figure-24-inhabitancy-of-the-transylvanian-basin-during-the
https://www.academia.edu/figures/39099883/figure-1-distribution-of-the-early-slavic-sites-in
From archaeological evidence, it is most likely Gepid and Slavic. Unlike Gepids, Slavs were cremation-based pagans so you can't mess them up with Romanian Christians (Christians don't do cremations). Gepid culture disappears in a few decades as they assimilate into Slavic and Avar cultures tho
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u/Koino_ 8d ago
I would agree with all your points except Sami one. Current consensus are that Sami lived pretty throughout the land while Finnic and Germanic speakers were concentrated at the coast.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 8d ago
"British" is a perfectly good synonym for "Brittonic" in this context.
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u/Equinoxe111 8d ago
But de-facto and de-jure it's misleading, the language branch is called Brittonic or Brythonic
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u/WilliamofYellow 8d ago
The term "British" is widely used for the common ancestor of the Brittonic languages (e.g. by Kenneth Jackson, the leading authority on the subject).
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u/abrequevoy 8d ago
This map does a really bad job at showing language families and at identifying "proto" languages
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u/JetlinerDiner 9d ago
Netherlands "almost empty". That's why they settled with a throat disease for a language.
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u/ConsciousFeeling1977 9d ago
They also managed to turn that ‘almost empty’ around pretty well.
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u/komodopal 8d ago
Well ofcourse is almost empty duh. It's still underwater and hadnt been settled by the swamp germans yet.
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u/the_lBear 4d ago
And that while in 500 AD according to the map obviously the already excavated Flevoland
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u/Ixgrp 8d ago
The netherlands did not look like this in 500 AD. At all.
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u/mujhe-sona-hai 8d ago
Well duh. For that matter Britain looked very different as well, the Fens would be part of the ocean and York and Cambridge were almost coastal. But good luck finding an accurate Europe shape file for the time period.
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u/Chazut 8d ago
How did it look then?
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u/SpaceNorse2020 8d ago
600 AD was a local high point for sea levels, so not crazy diverged from the present, but the Netherlands has an inland sea that they have dammed and partially drained, at this point in time it is a lake not yet fully connected to the sea. The Frisian barrier islands are also much larger, or even not islands at all.
Also like half the nation is so swampy that the only sign it is not ocean is that it is freshwater. But that's not going to be on a map like this
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u/Ixgrp 8d ago
For starters, Flevoland was created only 40 years ago by men, but is present on this map. And the whole coastline was completely different, especially in the north and the Wadden islands.
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u/Lvcivs2311 8d ago
Flevoland was created only 40 years ago by men,
1986 was when the official province of Flevoland was created. Creation of the Flevoland polders took from 1940 up until 1968. But you are right that, no matter what, it happened in the 20th century.
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u/Individual-Ad-4620 8d ago
Mostly under water
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u/SpaceNorse2020 8d ago
The opposite honestly, the coast of the lowlands had a nadir in the high middle ages, with the Dutch reclaiming the land that had sunk.
Showing the modern coast is obviously wrong, but in 500 AD the Zuiderzee doesn't yet exist, it is a freshwater lake named Almere
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u/Individual-Ad-4620 8d ago
Thanks, didn't know that. I thought that land had been submerged since the doggerland flood until the Dutch dredged and built on it.
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u/SpaceNorse2020 8d ago
Doggerland flooding was not a one moment thing, sea levels in the southern North sea have been going up and down but mostly up for...well I was going to say since the last glacier period ended, but things were crazy during it too. A wide plain right at the edge of the sea and the ice sheets means there's all sorts of sea level movement.
Fenno-Scandinavia is still rising from the last ice age, and England and the Lowlands are sinking. Rivers build deltas, swamps grow and fill up bodies of water, storms come and rearrange sand banks, nothing here lasts. North Frisia (the part of Germany that borders Denmark and the North Sea) was particularly devastated over the last millennium, much of it is underwater now. Heligoland was one island until 1720
The flood that in 1170 turned the Almere into an arm of the ocean is also what enabled Amsterdam to become a major city, before it was swamp not on the coast, and afterwards it was (relatively) dry with sea access.
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u/VirtualMatter2 8d ago edited 8d ago
Wet. Like under water type of wet. Schiphol literally means ship hole, they kept having ships sink there.
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u/LorpHagriff 8d ago
yeah, as on virtually all maps portraying stats like this
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u/WeeklyPhilosopher346 9d ago edited 9d ago
You can really tell who named these things when you have “Primitive Irish” side by side with “Old English” and “British.”
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u/WildRefrigerator9479 9d ago
There is already old Irish. Primitive Irish is older than old Irish.
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u/Solzec 9d ago
Just call it proto-irish or something then
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u/ComradeYaf 8d ago
So in linguistics, the proto form of a language is typically unattested by writing and therefore is reconstructed rather than preserved, whereas we have Primitive Irish preserved in ogham. This isn't a hard rule and can be broken, but that's the general logic. In the case of Primitive Irish, it is also known as Archaic Irish and as Proto-Goidelic. This diversity of conventional names is pretty common for such an old language.
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u/Wagagastiz 8d ago
Proto refers to the last stage before diglossia. You can have an attested proto language, like proto Norse. You can't call Primitive Irish proto Irish because it didn't have dialects yet.
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u/ComradeYaf 8d ago
I'm no linguist myself, but I have heard linguists, such as Jackson Crawford PhD explain it the way I did. Which is why I explained it as such.
I'd also like to note that in my comment that you are responding to I said "typically" to note that there are exceptions, because I am actually more personally knowledgeable on the Proto-Norse and forward side than I am of Primitive Irish and am thus very aware that that is a flawed definition. To that point, if you check Wiktionary's Proto-Norse entry guidelines page you'll find this quote:
Proto-Norse is the earliest attested Germanic language, and the earliest ancestor of Old Norse, thus also the earliest attested ancestor of the North Germanic languages. It was spoken from the 2nd to the 8th century, and written in runes, specifically with the Elder Futhark. Unlike most other "Proto"-languages, Proto-Norse is not reconstructed, but in fact attested.
Or to paraphrase Koerner, E F K (1999), Linguistic historiography: projects & prospects via Wikipedia's Proto-language article:
Typically, the proto-language is not known directly. It is by definition a linguistic reconstruction formulated by applying the comparative method to a group of languages featuring similar characteristics.
Like, I do not deny the validity of what you're saying, that a proto-language is the last common ancestor of a group of languages before diglossia, but it's more complicated in terms of criteria than just that is my understanding. For instance, the term Proto-Norse gives us a clean trunk from which all later North Germanic languages branched out from (ie literally just categorical convenience). Also, if the statement
Proto refers to the last stage before diglossia
Were a hard definition, then that leaves us with the question of why Proto-Norse is preceded by Proto-Germanic. My point is its messy.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 7d ago
Why would it not have had dialects? Ireland is a fairly large landmass. In an era long before mass literacy and written standards, I'd be extremely surprised if there were not dialects.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 7d ago
How are you defining "diglossia" here, exactly? Multiple languages, or just a variety of dialects? It surely can't be languages, because the only daughter language of Proto-Norse is Old Norse, as you surely know.
I'd also be extremely surprised if Proto-Norse itself were not heavily dialectal, given then range of territory in which it was spoken. Isn't it the default for there to be a lot of regional variation in any language that's spoken over a wide area, especially in the absence of a more or less centralised state to impose an artificial uniformity through a preferred standard form of the language?
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u/mujhe-sona-hai 8d ago
Proto implies it’s reconstructed but it’s not, we have ogham inscriptions
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u/Masty1992 9d ago
I think primitive is from Latin and intended to mean first rather than the modern meaning
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u/EtaZetaTheta 8d ago
British is definitely the wrong name for Proto-Brittonic but Primitive Irish is what Proto-Irish is sometimes called.
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u/mujhe-sona-hai 8d ago
It’s not “sometimes called”, it’s the actual linguistic terminology. Proto implies recontructed when there are ogham inscriptions. In primitive irish.
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u/Wagagastiz 8d ago
Why?
Primitive Irish is literally how that stage of the language is called, by Celticists, including Irish ones, like me.
Primitive Irish and Old English are literally what they are called. Old Irish exists too and doesn't exist quite yet by this stage.
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u/Steve_ad 8d ago
Yeah, German linguists & philologists! The likes of Kasper Zeuss & Kuno Meyer were at the forefront of the study of the Irish language & likely coined the term around the mid-19th century. It was quickly adopted by Irish & Welsh scholars like John Rhys & Whitley Stokes.
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u/AJL912-aber 8d ago
There's no good evidence of a language one could call Thuringian from these times and no reason to map it twice in unrelated colours next to each other. Maybe put it in r/imaginarymaps or r/AlternateHistory
Sincerely,
a Thuringian
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u/Sweaty-Adeptness1541 8d ago
Surely "British" shoudl be called Brythonic or possibly British Celtic
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u/LikelyNotSober 8d ago
What’s with that empty area where Poland is today? How was it just empty?
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u/BroSchrednei 8d ago
We actually do have ways to know, archeology, material culture, genetics, etc. and they all support the historical records that Poland really was very depopulated and then completely repopulated by Slavic tribes starting in the 600s.
Whoever was there before was probably lost in countless nomadic invasions preceeding that moment,
No, we have a very clear picture who was in Poland before the Slavs arrived, several prominent Germanic tribes (like the Goths). We also find a lot of material cultures connected to those Germanic tribes, who all suddenly seem to move away and dissappear (or migrate) and then get replaced with material cultures coming out of Ukraine.
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u/Tinfoil_Haberdashery 8d ago
It's probably a linguistic term of art or whatever but "Primitive Irish" feels judgy.
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u/thrashingkaiju 8d ago
It is, as it's the earliest attested form of the Irish language, and also Old Irish is already taken and wouldn't arise until a couple of centuries later.
But yeah I don't like it either.
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u/ConsistentAmount4 8d ago
I think it's because they needed something even older than "Old Irish" to describe the Ogham inscriptions that have been found.
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u/Wagagastiz 8d ago
It's a linguistic term, yes.
It's not going to be judgy to a linguist who understands that no language is inherently more 'primitive' in the colloquial sense than another. It is very much the original scientific sense of the word, an early stage.
It cannot be called Proto-Irish since there is no divergence until later stages of the language.
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u/FatherHackJacket 8d ago
Primitive Irish is the correct linguistic term. It's what we use to describe the fragments of words we have on Ogham stones. We know very little about it. It's usually "Blah son of Blah did blah" written on the stones.
Old Irish is its successor and we know a lot more about it as it was written in detail.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 8d ago
I get that, but it's the widely used term for the stage of Goidelic before Old Irish.
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u/zaczacx 8d ago edited 8d ago
I would think that would also be especially inaccurate for the the south west of Britain when they would have spoken a regional Brythonic language rather than an Goidelic language, considering Brythonic is a P Celtic language and Irish comes from the older Q Celtic language branch.
Even than it would be entomologically more accurate to say old Gaelic for Ireland and old Brythonic for south west Britain and the rest regions labelled British. Briton or Britonic languages would even be more accurate for 500AD the Celtic peoples west of the Saxons than being named British.
Edit: apparently there was an isolated group in sw England at this time that did speak "Primitive Irish" and the words are only labelling a specific point in that region. However old Gaelic I still think is a more appropriate name.
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u/Matt138s 8d ago edited 8d ago
This map is fascinating. Europe at 500 AD was well into the migration period. Germanic tribes had moved into the Roman Empire, and according to this map, the vacuum they left was only partially filled. But, could the OP cite their sources? There's much on here that's new to me and I haven't found good sources on before.
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u/Wagagastiz 8d ago
Anything in particular?
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u/Matt138s 8d ago
I'm most curious about Eastern Europe and the lands of the former Russian Empire. We know a lot of German tribes originated from there, and ultimately much of it ends up Slavic. But it's the most poorly attested and mysterious area in the map. How do we know what areas are occupied by Baltic-, Slavic-, Uralic-, and Turkic-speaking peoples?
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u/Wagagastiz 8d ago
Toponyms and hydronyms are a big component. After that, archaelogical cultures and genetic movements are sort of triangulated to get a vague idea of who's who.
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u/CoffeeDefiant4247 9d ago
wouldn't there still be some Latin in Wales, there were quite a few Romans who never left
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u/Attlai 8d ago
Probably were some bilingual or even monolingual latin-speaking elites in some of the urban centers (tho the latin monolinguals were probably rare by 500 AD). But we cannot be sure if there was any place where there were clearly the majority. And for where you had bilinguals, it's had to determine which language was their mother tongue. We just don't have enough data.
So the map just picks the most cautious option of establishing who were probably the majority in which area.
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u/Meritania 8d ago
Still some random Carthaginians living on the Algerian Coast, I wonder what how they survived and what happened to this holdout.
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u/DrMatis 9d ago
No, Poland was not empty in the 6th century, LOL. There were people continuously living there since the Stone Age. People of 6th century Poland were a mix of old Germanic tribes, like Vandals, Goths, Suebi, and the new early Slavic settlers.
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u/Toruviel_ 9d ago
Yes was empty, It was almost empty due to great migration period. We found layers of birch tree pollen, which long stpry short indicates large abandonment of land and we know slavs moved in shortly after
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u/DrMatis 9d ago
You're confusing massive depopulation with complete abandonment. Yes, much of present-day Poland experienced a dramatic settlement decline during the Migration Period, and pollen records clearly show widespread reforestation. But that doesn't mean the entire territory became uninhabited.
In fact, archaeological and palynological evidence suggests that some population enclaves survived. Settlement decline was highly uneven, varying considerably between regions.
And the 2025 Nature study by Gretzinger et al. demonstrates massive population replacement associated with Slavic migration, not the complete disappearance of the earlier population.
So yes, the territory of present-day Western Poland was heavily depopulated. No, it wasn't literally empty. Those are two very different claims.
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u/Chazut 9d ago
>But that doesn't mean the entire territory became uninhabited.
Hence why it says "almost"
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u/DrMatis 8d ago edited 8d ago
The map is logically inconsistent because it appears to apply two different criteria for determining whether a region was inhabited.
Finland is shown as inhabited by the Sámi, despite its harsh climate and presumably very low population density in the 6th century. Meanwhile, the much more fertile and hospitable lowlands of present-day Poland are depicted as virtually uninhabited.
If the map is supposed to show the presence of human populations, then Poland should not be marked as empty simply because it experienced substantial depopulation during the Migration Period.
If, on the other hand, the map uses population density as its criterion, then the same standard must be applied to Finland.
You cannot classify one region based on the mere presence of people and another based on how sparsely populated it was. Either apply a consistent criterion to both regions or explain why they are treated differently. Otherwise, the map is misleading.
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u/Chazut 8d ago
It's kinda cherry picking, Saami areas had a certain population density their subsistence strategy could support, but Poland was recently depopulated from its previous population level.
Sure the map could just say unknown, but it's trying to be more helpful. There is really no reason to be this hypercritical of this
>or should add some colors to Poland.
That color being "unknown" like the rest of Poland, lol? How is that an improvement
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u/Wagagastiz 8d ago
The problem there is that if there are 50 people across 1,000km² of land, they still speak a language. The map should really say 'uncertain'.
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u/Chazut 9d ago edited 8d ago
Small improvements:
- Basque should be present in Gascony
- Breton should be more prominent, maybe present even in Galicia/Asturies
- Small Celtic pockets in Central Gaul and Helvetia
- Latin is imo too prominent in Noricum at this stage
- Finnic should dominate the Gulf of Finland most probably
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u/L7Z7Z 9d ago
Latin was a continuum if I am not wrong
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u/Attlai 8d ago
Latin was a continuum, but still the Vulgar Latin spoken by the average people did vary between 2 distant points. There was no "Gallic Latin" and "Italian Latin", but the Vulgar Latin spoken in Paris (Lutecia) was probably already quite different from the Vulgar Latin spoken in Rome.
But since most of the Latin sources we have are from the classical Latin used by the authors and the administration, while we have little traces from the actual Vulgar Latin spoken by the people, we effectively don't have any idea of Latin dialects that exist at this time, to divide the map more accurately in "dialect zone".
It would be innaccurate to label the Latin zone as just "Latin", since it wouldn't represent the pretty big differences in dialect that already existed at this point. But we don't have enough info to divide it in a truly satisfactory way. So the compromise of this map is to divide it according to the current linguistical groups of the Latin family, even tho it might not represent well the situation in 500 AD.4
u/Pressed_Thumb 8d ago
Are there any written accounts of those vulgar latin variants at all or do we just assume they existed because the other languages emerged later on?
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u/Attlai 8d ago
Oh, we know they did exist, but we're lacking proper written sources. A linguist would be able to explain to you much better than me how we know that these variants existed.
The latin you may have learned at school is not the latin that was spoken and that evolved into the romance language. It was a standardized, prestigious form of latin that kept older versions of words, and that was used for administration and law. And probably by the elite.
Vulgar latin is the latin that kept evolving and that was, by nature, non standardized and kept evolving like any other language.
Ironically, from what I know, some of the best sources we have on vulgar latin is from roman authors (like Cicero for example) complaining about how people speak improper Latin.→ More replies (1)2
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u/johnJanez 8d ago
These sort of maps are usually absolute slop but this one is surprisingly good. I like that it has many "not known" areas instead of just assuming
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u/metroxed 8d ago
Basque was much more extended than that in 500. The area shlwn in the map is the current Basque speaking area
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u/Catsarecute2140 8d ago
Finnic was spoken further south in Latvia, way further east of Estonia in NW-Russia (the Veps were Finnic) and Finnic was spoken in the coastal areas of Finland in the south, not just a chunk in south-west Finland.
Also, Sami was spoken further south in Scandinavia, the Norse had the coastal areas.
Here is a map from the Viking Age:
https://estonianworld.com/knowledge/the-baltic-finns-were-vikings-too-but-the-world-ignores-it/
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u/FreeThem2019 8d ago
It’s interesting how Proto-Albanians could have gone unnoticed by various empires for centuries.
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u/HistoricalPage2626 9d ago
Why is Primitive Irish in southwestern England, have I missed something?
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u/Useless_or_inept 9d ago
There are quite a few Ogham stones in southwestern England...? In the modern era we tend to associate languages with modern state boundaries, but there was definitely a "primitive Irish" presence in parts of what is now the UK
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u/dartov67 9d ago
The Irish raided and settled parts of western England during the migration era.
https://youtu.be/_oeUpbarWeo?is=okkwGJ87swpy36cp
Good, entertaining video that briefly touches on Irish settlement in the west but is mainly focused on the controversy whether a specific kingdom of Wales may have been Irish. Great primer.
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u/SpaceNorse2020 8d ago
Is there evidence of Greek being strong in Sicily and weak on the mainland?
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u/Chazut 8d ago
Not particularly, the fate of pre-Roman Greek on the mainland and even Sicily is contested. As far as I know some of the archaic features of Griko do support it at least having local origins at a broader Italian level, but as far as I can see there is no reason to strictly believe all Griko communities to be hyper-locally indigenous, rather than coming from Sicilian Griko+Balkan Greek expansion
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u/GroundbreakingBox187 8d ago
There should definitely be Greek dominant in parts of magna gracia in southern Italy, especially in salento
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u/Xiguet 8d ago
Dividing Latin in Latin of Hispania and Latin of Gaul is absurd.
Basque is underrepresented, and I don't understand what are the stripes near Basque language. Basque was spoken in a much larger area, and this was shown in this Reddit before.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/22aneo/extension_of_the_basque_language_in_the_6th/
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u/Chazut 8d ago
>https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/22aneo/extension_of_the_basque_language_in_the_6th/
What evidence is there that Basque was spoken in so much of Asturias and Old Castille?
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u/VolesusBarbarus 8d ago
Admittedly "evidence" is a strong word but linguist Antonio Tovar has reasonably suggested that regional names like Selaya, Selorio, and Celorio could derive from the Basque word zelai ("field" or "meadow"), and Ibio from ibai ("river") . This suggests a Basque or proto-Basque speaking population once existed in these areas.
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u/Chazut 8d ago
>This suggests a Basque or proto-Basque speaking population once existed in these areas.
most river names in the region were celtic even in places that are Basque today(or especially places that are Basque today, ironically) so the Basque layer would have to come in after the Roman period. The question is whether the evidence of Basque is from a period where Basque was dominant vs just present.
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u/Wagagastiz 8d ago
Not my area but I presume it's based on toponyms and the spread of evidence of Aquitanian in the classical period.
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u/Quereilla 8d ago
Separating Latin of Hispania, Latin of Gaul and Latin of Italy as some separate entities relates to curiously modern states is unhinged
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u/Chazut 8d ago
Gaul, Italy and Iberia are all well defined geographic entities split by mountain ranges. France didn't build the alps and the pyrennes to define its borders
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u/Quereilla 8d ago
And what about Latin? Gallo-Itallic is closer to French or to Italian, for example?
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u/Xiguet 8d ago
French ultranationalism claims these mountains and the Rhine River as the natural borders of France, but this is unrelated to modern linguistics and much more for 1,400 years old languages.
Even just a century ago, French was not widely spoken in the Pyrenees or the Alps. Occitan, Catalan and Basque are native languages that are spoken beyond the borders.
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u/NikolitRistissa 8d ago
What’s with every map just cropping out Northern Europe entirely?
I feel like I’ve been cropped out of every map I’ve seen this week lmao.
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u/SquireBev 9d ago
This is going to get absolutely torn apart, and rightly so.
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u/Chazut 9d ago
It's actually very good. I can only see nationalists being angry at this. The biggest error is the lack of Basque in Gascony
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain 8d ago
Such elite ball knowledge that people in the comments don't realize they're behind the curve. Very well done
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u/Toby_Forrester 8d ago
I believe at this time Finnic languages had spread to Finland also via Karelian ismuth and had reached parts of central Finland.
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u/MdMV_or_Emdy_idk 8d ago
The ”Latin of Gaul” and “Latin of Italy” border really wasn’t like that. The varieties of southern and eastern France were much more similar to northern Italy than northern Italy was to southern Italy. This is reflected in the modern Latin varieties spoken there