The Proto-Uralic homeland is the earliest location in which the Proto-Uralic language was spoken, before its speakers dispersed geographically causing it to diverge into multiple languages. Various locations have been proposed and debated, although as of 2022 "scholarly consensus now gravitates towards a relatively recent provenance of the Uralic languages east of the Ural mountains". [1]
It has been suggested that the Proto-Uralic homeland was located near the Ural Mountains, either on the European or the Siberian side. The main reason to suppose that there was a Siberian homeland has been the traditional taxonomic model that sees the Samoyedic branch as splitting off first. Because the present border between the Samoyedic and the Ugric branch is in Western Siberia, the original split was seen to have occurred there too.
However, a European homeland would be equally possible because the Ugric languages are known to have been spoken earlier on the European side of the Urals. In recent years, it has also been argued based on phonology that the oldest split was not between the Samoyedic and the Finno-Ugric but between the Finno-Permic and the Ugro-Samoyedic language groups. [2] The lexical level is argued to be less reliable, and lexical innovativeness (a small number of shared cognates) can be confused because of the great age of the division. No new arguments for a Siberian homeland have been presented for a long time.
Both European and Siberian homeland proposals have been supported by palaeolinguistic evidence, but only those cases in which the semantic reconstructions are certain and valid. A Siberian homeland has been claimed based on two coniferous tree names in Proto-Uralic, but the trees ( Abies sibirica and Pinus sibirica ) [3] have for a long time been present also in the far east of Europe. A European homeland is supported by words for 'bee', 'honey', 'elm' etc. [4] They can be reconstructed already to Proto-Uralic, if Samoyedic is no longer seen as the first branch to split off. [5]
More recently, loanword evidence has also been used to support a European homeland. Proto-Uralic has been seen as borrowing words from Proto-Indo-European, [6] [7] and the Proto-Indo-European homeland has rarely been located east of the Urals. Proto-Uralic even seems to have developed in close contact with Proto-Indo-Iranian, [8] which is seen as having arisen in the Poltavka culture of the Caspian steppes before its spread to Asia. [9]
Bryant et al. (2005) equated the Lyalovo culture (ca. 5000–3650 BC) with the Proto-Uralic urheimat, and the following Volosovo culture (ca. 3650–1900 BC) with the Proto-Finno-Ugric urheimat. [10] Two Finnish scholars believe that the culture of Lyalovo was the Proto-Uralic urheimat and that its inhabitants spread Uralic languages to north-eastern Europe. [11] The Volosovo culture has been named the Bronze Age Successor Culture, a textile-ceramic culture that developed in the region between Upper Volga and lakes Ladoga and Onega. It was distinguished from other groups based on the traces of textile used for the production of ceramics, and spread southeast all the way to central Volga, south to the entire river valley of the Oka, southwest to the northern shore of the Daugava, and northwest of Fennoscandia to Karelia, Finland and northern Sweden and Norway. [12] Known as the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, it was a culturally unified, extensive network of trade in copper and bronze. The traces of the Seima-Turbino phenomenon are found in a wide area that begins in Sweden and ends in the Altai Mountains. [13] [14] [15]
However, Jaakko Häkkinen argues that the language of the Volosovo culture was not itself Uralic, but a Paleo-European substratum to Uralic, especially its westernmost branches, and identifies Proto-Uralic with the Garino-Bor culture instead. [16]
The Volosovo region was invaded by the Abashevo cultural groups at about 2300 BC. The latter buried their deceased in kurgans, and they are thought to have spoken a form of Indo-European ancestral to the Indo-Iranian languages and to have influenced the Volosovian vocabulary by introducing Aryan (Indo-Iranian) loan words. The Abashevo contributed to the fact that livestock farming and small-scale farming began to be practiced in the southern parts of the forest zone of Taiga. [17] [18]
It has been hypothesized that Pre-Proto-Uralic was spoken in Asia, on the basis of typological similarity with the Altaic Sprachbund [19] and hypothetical early contacts with the Yukaghir languages. [20] Aikio (2014) agrees with Häkkinen (2012) that Uralic–Yukaghir is unsupported and implausible, and that common vocabulary shared by the two families is best explained as the result of borrowing from Uralic into Yukaghir. However, Aikio (2014) puts the date of borrowing much later, arguing that the loanwords he accepts as valid were borrowed from an early stage of Samoyedic (preceding Proto-Samoyedic; thus roughly in the 1st millennium BC) into Yukaghir, in the same general region between the Yenisei River and Lake Baikal. [21]
Archaeological continuity has long been used as the basis of an argument for linguistic continuity. The argument was advanced by Estonians Paul Ariste and Harri Moora in 1956. [22] Just as long, this kind of argumentation has also been heavily criticised. The oldest version of the continuity theory can be called the moderate or shallow continuity theory. It claims that linguistic continuity in Estonia and Finland can be traced back to the arrival of Typical Combed Ware, about 6,000 years ago. This view became mainstream in the multidisciplinary Tvärminne symposium in 1980. [23] At the time, there seemed to be no serious linguistic results to contradict this archaeological view.
The continuity argumentation in the Uralic studies gained greater visibility in the 1990s, when the next step of the continuity theory was popularised (even though this line of reasoning had occasionally received airing). In the radical or deep continuity theory, it is claimed that the linguistic continuity in Finland could be traced back to the Mesolithic initial colonization, beyond 10,000 years. [24] [25]
However, in Indo-European studies, J. P. Mallory had already thoroughly scrutinized the methodological weaknesses of the continuity argumentation in 1989. [26] In Uralic studies, it was also soon noted that the same argument (archaeological continuity) was used to support contradicting views, which revealed the method's unreliability. [27] [28] [29] [30]
At the same time, new linguistic results appeared to contradict the continuity theories: the datings of Proto-Saami [31] [32] and Proto-Finnic [33] and of Proto-Uralic (Kallio 2006; Häkkinen 2009) [5] [34] are both clearly younger than it was thought in the framework of the continuity theories.
Nowadays linguists rarely believe in the continuity theories because of their shown methodological flaws and their incompatibility with the new linguistic results, but some archaeologists and laymen may still advance such arguments. [35]
In the 21st century, linguistic arguments have placed the Proto-Uralic homeland possibly around the Kama River or, more generally, close to the Great Volga Bend and the Ural Mountains, although Petri Kallio, while agreeing with the placement of the homeland in Central Russia, prefers the Volga-Oka region further to the west. [36] The expansion of Proto-Uralic has been dated to about 2000 BC (4000 years ago), and its earlier stages go back at least one or two millennia earlier. Either way, this is considerably later than the earlier views of the continuity theories, which would place Proto-Uralic deep into Europe. [5] [34] Asko Parpola associates the early Proto-Uralic language with the Neolithic Elshanka and Kama cultures, placing the ultimate homeland of Uralic languages to the Kama River valley. Proto-Uralic would later expand with the Seima-Turbino material culture. According to him, Uralic languages were transmitted by language shift from groups of hunters and fishers participating in the spread of the Seima-Turbino culture towards Siberia. [37]
An alternative view has been presented by Juha Janhunen (2009), who argues for a homeland in southern or central Siberia, somewhere between the Ob and Yenisei river or near the Sayan mountains in the Russian–Mongolian border region. [35]
This view has been corroborated by a number of scholars, including by a team around Grünthal et al. 2022. They presented evidence that the Proto-Uralic homeland was located east of the Urals, likely somewhere in Siberia, and spoken by local hunter-gatherer communities. The Finno-Ugric branch spread along rivers north- and westwards into the Volga region, while the Samoyedic branch headed north-and eastwards. The spread of Uralic languages may be in part due to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, although no direct link between them can be made yet. The material culture technology of proto-Uralic-speakers can be described as "Neolithic", as it included pottery but no vocabulary for food production. They further concluded that Proto-Uralic must have stood out of contact with Proto-Indo-European and did not share any genealogical ancestry with Indo-European, arguing that "whether based on cognacy or loans the argument from lexical resemblances is flawed", invalidating previous arguments for a homeland in the Volga region. Last, they noted that a number of traits of Uralic are "distinctive in western Eurasia. A number of typological properties are eastern-looking overall, fitting comfortably into northeast Asia, Siberia, or the North Pacific Rim", and are rare or absent in Europe, and that the Uralic languages "must have expanded via language shift", while "the shifting population had minimal impact on Proto-Uralic grammar and vocabulary". [38] [39]
Rasmus G. Bjørn (2022), citing the previous findings, such as Grünthal et al. 2022, argues that the Proto-Uralic speakers likely resided in Southern Siberia, and may have been part of the local Okunev culture in the Altai region, following the proposals of Janhunen and Peyrot. He notes that contact between Uralic and the Indo-European branches of Tocharian and Indo-Iranian at the one hand, and between Uralic and Turkic at the other hand, support a homeland near the Altai Mountains. An association with the Seima-Turbino phenomenon and the dispersal of Uralic languages "fits the string-like distribution of the western Uralic languages as well as close contacts with the Andronovo (and preceding Sintashta) culture associated with speakers of Indo-Iranian. Proto-Samoyedic was then either left in or migrated to the area around the Minusinsk Basin". Bjørn attributes the "eastern lexical elements" to contact with Turkic, which radiated out from the Amur region and can be associated with Northeast Asian linguistic area. [40]
Jaakko Häkkinen (2023) argues that the location of Early Proto-Uralic and more distant stages are temporally irrelevant for the location of the Late Proto-Uralic homeland. He further elaborates that the "very distant Pre-Proto-Uralic" may have been spoken far from the region where Late Proto-Uralic was spoken. Häkkinen argues that Late Proto-Uralic and the successive stages of disintegration happened in the Central Ural Region, based on certain tree names and Indo-Iranian loanword layers. According to him, the disintegration of the proto-language began soon after 2500 BCE, but the speech community remained in a narrow region for a long time, until the second millennium BCE, after which the actual Uralic expansion began. On this basis the early phase of the Seima-Turbino Network in Southwestern Siberia could not yet be associated to the Uralic languages, but perhaps the later stages in Europe could. In any case, according to him, the arrival of the Uralic language in the Central Ural Region would precede even the early stage of the Seima-Turbino network. [41]
Vladimir Napolskikh, who studied the origins of the "earth-diver" creation myths, has concluded that a certain variety of those myths, which is found in the folklore of Uralic-speaking peoples and other N1, C3, and Q (Y-DNA) carrying populations, originated in Siberia. [42]
Genetic data suggests that early Uralic-speakers may be associated with hunter-gatherers in Western and Southern Siberia. These specific Uralic-speaking hunter-gatherers are argued to have formed from an admixture event between Western and Eastern Eurasian sources, with the calculated date of admixture is inferred to be ~7–9 kya. The Western source can be attributed to local Ancient North Eurasians, while the Eastern sources can be linked to "Neo-Siberians" (Eastern Siberian hunter-gatherers). [43]
A number of population genomic studies in 2018 and 2019 note that the spread of Uralic languages may be associated with observed "Siberian" geneflow (represented by Nganasans) into the Eastern Baltic region. [44] The proto-Uralic languages may be associated with early "Neo-Siberian" expansions outgoing from Northeast Asia westwards (~6-11kya), which largely replaced previous "Paleosiberian groups", but predated the expansion of Turkic languages. [45] [46]
Rasmus G. Bjørn (2022) argues for a link between the Proto-Uralic-speakers and the pre-Indo-European Okunevo culture, as well as to the Tarim EMBA cluster. He argues that following the expansion of Indo-Europeans eastwards and Northeast Asian (putative Turkic) groups westwards meeting in the Altai region, the early Uralic-speaking groups dispersed along the Seima-Turbino route. He also notes a correspondence between this expansion route and the frequency of haplogroup N. [1]
Peltola et al. 2023 reproduced the findings that modern Uralic-speaking populations display varying degrees of ancestry from a "Siberian" source maximized in modern day Nganasan people. Nganasans and a historical specimen from Bronze Age Southern Siberia (Krasnoyarsk_Krai_BA; kra001) were found to display the lowest f4 estimate for the eastern ancestry among Uralic-speaking populations, and represent a plausible source. In contrast, affinity for Ancient North Eurasian-rich ancestry (represented by Eastern Hunter-Gatherers) was not significant and only observed among Western Finno-Ugric speakers. [48]
Finno-Ugric is a traditional grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except the Samoyedic languages. Its formerly commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in the 19th century and is criticized by some contemporary linguists such as Tapani Salminen and Ante Aikio. The three most spoken Uralic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, are all included in Finno-Ugric.
The Uralic languages, sometimes called the Uralian languages, form a language family of 42 languages spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers above 100,000 are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi spoken in the European parts of the Russian Federation. Still smaller minority languages are Sámi languages of the northern Fennoscandia; other members of the Finnic languages, ranging from Livonian in northern Latvia to Karelian in northwesternmost Russia; and the Samoyedic languages, Mansi and Khanty spoken in Western Siberia.
Ural-Altaic, Uralo-Altaic, Uraltaic, or Turanic is a linguistic convergence zone and abandoned language-family proposal uniting the Uralic and the Altaic languages. It is now generally agreed that even the Altaic languages do not share a common descent: the similarities between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic are better explained by diffusion and borrowing. Just as in Altaic, the internal structure of the Uralic family has been debated since the family was first proposed. Doubts about the validity of most or all of the proposed higher-order Uralic branchings are becoming more common. The term continues to be used for the central Eurasian typological, grammatical and lexical convergence zone.
The Yukaghir languages are a small family of two closely related languages—Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir—spoken by the Yukaghir in the Russian Far East living in the basin of the Kolyma River. At the 2002 Russian census, both Yukaghir languages taken together had 604 speakers. More recent reports from the field reveal that this number is far too high: Southern Yukaghir had maximum 60 fluent speakers in 2009, while the Tundra Yukaghir language had around 60–70. The entire family is thus to be regarded as moribund. The Yukaghir have experienced a politically imposed language shift in recent times, and a majority also speak Russian and Yakut.
The Nganasans are a Uralic people of the Samoyedic branch native to the Taymyr Peninsula in north Siberia. In the Russian Federation, they are recognized as one of the indigenous peoples of the Russian North. They reside primarily in the settlements of Ust-Avam, Volochanka, and Novaya in the Taymyrsky Dolgano-Nenetsky District of Krasnoyarsk Krai, with smaller populations residing in the towns of Dudinka and Norilsk as well.
The Ugric or Ugrian languages are a branch of the Uralic language family.
Indo-Uralic is a highly controversial linguistic hypothesis proposing a genealogical family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic.
Uralo-Siberian is a hypothetical language family consisting of Uralic, Yukaghir, and Eskaleut. It was proposed in 1998 by Michael Fortescue, an expert in Eskaleut and Chukotko-Kamchatkan, in his book Language Relations across Bering Strait. Some have attempted to include Nivkh in Uralo-Siberian. Until 2011, it also included Chukotko-Kamchatkan. However, after 2011 Fortescue only included Uralic, Yukaghir and Eskaleut in the theory, although he argued that Uralo-Siberian languages have influenced Chukotko-Kamchatkan.
Proto-Uralic is the unattested reconstructed language ancestral to the modern Uralic language family. The reconstructed language is thought to have been originally spoken in a small area in about 7000–2000 BCE, and then expanded across northern Eurasia, gradually diverging into a dialect continuum and then a language family in the process. The location of the area or Urheimat is not known, and various strongly differing proposals have been advocated, but the vicinity of the Ural Mountains is generally accepted as the most likely.
Geographically, Siberia includes the Russian Urals, Siberian, and Far Eastern Federal Districts.
The Finno-Permic or Finno-Permian languages, sometimes just Finnic or Fennic languages, are a proposed subdivision of the Uralic languages which comprise the Balto-Finnic languages, Sámi languages, Mordvinic languages, Mari language, Permic languages and likely a number of extinct languages. In the traditional taxonomy of the Uralic languages, Finno-Permic is estimated to have split from Finno-Ugric around 3000–2500 BC, and branched into Permic languages and Finno-Volgaic languages around 2000 BC. Nowadays the validity of the group as a taxonomical entity is being questioned, and the interrelationships of its five branches are debated with little consensus.
Uralic–Yukaghir, also known as Uralo-Yukaghir, is a proposed language family composed of Uralic and Yukaghir.
The Ob-Ugric languages are a commonly proposed branch of the Uralic languages, grouping together the Khanty (Ostyak) and Mansi (Vogul) languages. Both languages are split in numerous and highly divergent dialects. The Ob-Ugric languages and Hungarian comprise the proposed Ugric branch of the Uralic language family.
Elements of a Proto-Uralic religion can be recovered from reconstructions of the Proto-Uralic language.
The Eskimo–Uralic hypothesis posits that the Uralic and Eskimo–Aleut language families belong to a common macrofamily. It is not generally accepted by linguists because the similarities can also be merely areal features, common to unrelated language families. In 1818, the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask grouped together the languages of Greenlandic and Finnish. The Eskimo–Uralic hypothesis was put forward by Knut Bergsland in 1959. Ante Aikio stated that it's possible that there exists some connection between the two families, but exact conclusions can't be drawn and the similarities could exist by loaning.
The Seima-Turbino culture, also Seima-Turbinsky culture or Seima-Turbino phenomenon, is a pattern of burial sites with similar bronze artifacts. Seima-Turbino is attested across northern Eurasia, particularly Siberia and Central Asia, maybe from Fennoscandia to Mongolia, Northeast China, Russian Far East, Korea, and Japan. The homeland is considered to be the Altai Mountains. These findings have suggested a common point of cultural origin, possession of advanced metal working technology, and unexplained rapid migration. The buried were nomadic warriors and metal-workers, traveling on horseback or two-wheeled carts.
The Kama culture is an Eastern European Subneolithic archaeological culture from the 6th-4th millennium BC. The area covers the Kama, Vyatka and the Ik-Belaya watershed.
The Paleo-European languages, or Old European languages, are the mostly unknown languages that were spoken in Europe prior to the spread of the Indo-European and Uralic families caused by the Bronze Age invasion from the Eurasian steppe of pastoralists whose descendant languages dominate the continent today. The vast majority of modern European populations speak Indo-European languages, but until the Bronze Age, it was the opposite, with Paleo-European languages of non-Indo-European affiliation dominating the linguistic landscape of Europe.
Pre-Finno-Ugric substrate refers to substratum loanwords from unidentified non-Indo-European and non-Uralic languages that are found in various Finno-Ugric languages, most notably Sami. The presence of Pre-Finno-Ugric substrate in Sami languages was demonstrated by Ante Aikio. Janne Saarikivi points out that similar substrate words are present in Finnic languages as well, but in much smaller numbers.
Paleo-Laplandic is a hypothetical group of extinct but related languages spoken in Sápmi. The speakers of Paleo-Laplandic languages switched to Sámi languages, and the languages became extinct around AD 500. A considerable amount of words in Sámi languages originate from Paleo-Laplandic; more than 1,000 loanwords from Paleo-Laplandic likely exist. Many toponyms in Sápmi originate from Paleo-Laplandic. Because Sámi language etymologies for reindeers have preserved a large number of words from Paleo-Laplandic, this suggests that Paleo-Laplandic groups influenced Sámi culture.
Alternative link to free pdf:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360290015_Location_of_the_Uralic_proto-language_in_the_Kama_River_Valley_and_the_Uralic_speakers'_Expansion_east_and_west_with_the_'Sejma-Turbino_transcultural_phenomenon'_2200-1900_BC
PU had (and the modern Uralic languages mostly still have) a number of typological traits that are typical of the greater North Pacific Rim area and not of western Eurasia. These traits are shared with many Siberian languages but are (otherwise) rare in Europe. More precisely, the patterns, as types, are found throughout Siberia and nearby; in Uralic, the morphemes marking them are generally native to Uralic. Uralic languages also have a number of traits that define what I call the Inner Asian type. These traits are not all typical of the North Pacific Rim or Siberian linguistic populations but rather are hallmarks of a smaller set of families: prototypically, Tungusic, Turkic, Mongolic, and Uralic or at least eastern Uralic; to a lesser extent, Korean, Japonic, and Eskimo-Aleut.
Proto-Uralic was probably spoken in the Okunevo culture that constitutes the latest possible period for adoption of loanwords before the formation of the separate branches. The analysis also supports the proposition that an early stage of the Proto-Turkic language community was present around the Altai Mountains before 2000 BC, probably reflected in the eastern genetic component of Okunevo, and surely in the culturally transmitted loanwords of Indo-European provenance shared with early Uralic.
Our results also provide insights for ongoing anthropological debates about the origin of indigenous populations in the Uralic region. Uralic people had been considered as mixed groups descended from the longtime admixture between Europeans and Asians. Our model of gene flows during the last 50,000 yr in Europe, East Asia, and Siberia (Fig. 8) provides support for Bunak's hypothesis since Western Siberians were associated with a distinct ancient lineage, possibly related to ANE people. At the same time, our models suggest a more complex scenario that included admixture with ancient Eastern Siberians who came into contact with proto Western Siberians ~7–9 kya.
Most modern Siberian speakers of Neosiberian languages genetically fall on an East- West cline between Europeans and Early East Asians. Taking Even speakers as representatives, the Neosiberian turnover from the south, which largely replaced Ancient Paleosiberian ancestry, can be associated with the northward spread of Tungusic and probably also Turkic and Mongolic. However, the expansions of Tungusic as well as Turkic and Mongolic are too recent to be associable with the earliest waves of Neosiberian ancestry, dated later than ~11 kya, but discernible in the Baikal region from at least 6 kya onwards. Therefore, this phase of the Neosiberian population turnover must initially have transmitted other languages or language families into Siberia, including possibly Uralic and Yukaghir.
