The Germanic languages spread to Europe from Sweden

Over a billion people speak a Germanic language. Like English, German, Dutch, Frisian, Swedish, Norwegian or Danish. The language group belongs to the Indo-European language family and for decades researchers have been interested in how and when these languages ​​arose and spread.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of the origins of languages, an international research team, led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, has now carried out a comprehensive survey in which they have combined linguistics, archeology and genetics. The latter through the fact that they have partly analyzed the DNA from more than 4,500 historical individuals, whose genomes researchers have already mapped, and partly sequenced the genomes of 712 completely new historical individuals.

- DNA sequences do not say what language people spoke. But by combining DNA with linguistics and archaeological findings, we can figure out how languages ​​spread and changed over thousands of years, says one of the authors behind the new study, Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen, in a comment.

The mapping, which was recently presented in the journal Nature, shows a previously unknown migration to southern Sweden from areas in the Baltics about 4,000 years ago. By all accounts, the researchers write, these people brought with them a language, a kind of "proto-Germanic", which would eventually develop into the Germanic languages ​​we know today. 500 years later this language was spread throughout Scandinavia and after another 500 years it was in northern Germany. According to the researchers, this may well be true, as there is linguistic evidence that there was an exchange with other language groups in this area at the same time.

Another 1,000 years later, the genetic mapping shows, these people had moved down into Central Europe, into Southern and Western Europe. This also fits well with linguistic theories and historical findings, such as that Germanic inscriptions, so-called runes, appeared around the same time. The British Isles were also colonized and the Anglo-Saxon settlers, who spoke a precursor to Old English, show the same genetic origin.

The results also indicate that, around 1,500 years ago, there was a "back migration" to the extent that people from areas in northern Germany moved to Denmark and southern Sweden. This coincides with the emergence of Old Norse, the language varieties that were spoken in the Nordics during the Viking and Middle Ages and which are the forerunners of the Scandinavian languages ​​we have today. The findings also indicate that a large part of the genetic origin of the Vikings can be traced to these newcomers, who thus arrived in Scandinavia in the 6th century, several hundred years before the Viking Age. Genetically speaking, these newcomers were also close to the people from southern Denmark and northern Germany who in the fourth century onwards began to settle in the British Isles, where they gave rise to the Anglo-Saxon culture.

- This return migration came as a surprise. It could explain several of the cultural and linguistic similarities that existed between Scandinavia (before and during the Viking Age) and the Anglo-Saxon culture of Britain (at the same time) and which have puzzled researchers for a long time, says Hugh McColl at the University of Copenhagen.