This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: English, German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages are all members of the Germanic language group, spoken by hundreds of millions of people today. But where did these languages come from?
According to two new studies published in Nature, part of the answer may lie in the DNA of thousands of ancient Europeans. An international team led by the University of Copenhagen and Leiden University analyzed DNA from more than 4,500 ancient individuals, including 712 genomes sequenced for the first time. By combining genetics, archaeology and linguistics, the researchers reconstructed major migrations that helped shape the languages spoken across Europe today.
"DNA sequences do not tell us directly which language people spoke. But by combining ancient DNA with linguistic and archaeological evidence, we can begin to trace how languages spread and changed over thousands of years," says Eske Willerslev, senior author of the studies and professor at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen. The researchers identified a previously unknown major migration into Scandinavia around 4,000 years ago.
The newcomers likely arrived from areas around the Baltic Sea and spread rapidly across Scandinavia. Their arrival had a lasting impact on northern European populations, leading researchers to suggest that they may have carried the earliest ancestor of today's Germanic languages. This challenges the long-held assumption that the roots of Germanic languages arrived with earlier migrations about 5,000 years ago.
Instead, the findings suggest that the linguistic foundations of English, German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages may have spread 1,000 years later than previously thought. "For over a century, scholars have debated when and from where the Germanic languages arrived in northern Europe. What is exciting is that we can now test some of these ideas directly.
We discovered a previously unknown migration that occurred at exactly the time and place where we would expect the earliest form of Germanic to be spreading," says Hugh McColl, assistant professor at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the study. The studies also uncovered an unexpected chapter of Scandinavian history. Around 1,500 years ago, several centuries before the Viking Age, people from what is now northern Germany migrated into Denmark and southern Sweden.
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