The language-contact landscape in the Baltics during the first millennium BC

It is well known that Finnic obtained a large number of loanwords from both Germanic and Baltic, and inferences about the nature of these contacts and the lives of the people speaking these languages have been made based on the existing loanword material. In this paper we go deeper into the topic via a novel combination of three aspects. First, we divided Finnic into the stages Early, Middle, and Late Proto-Finnic and focused specifically on Germanic and Baltic loanwords in Early and Middle Proto-Finnic as those were most likely the languages spoken in the Baltic region during the first millennium BC. Second, by focusing on this early loanword material we combined linguistic and archaeological evidence around three themes: 1) agriculture, 2) bronzeworking and its implications, and 3) family life. We found a surprisingly coherent group of Germanic loanwords related to bronze casting, and we propose that the speakers of both Germanic and Finnic were living in fortified settlements and participated in the bronze-casting business. The connections between Finnic and Baltic were more familial as indicated by the borrowing of several kinship terms. Third, we considered the language-contact situation in the Baltics as a whole, i.e. we also discussed what we know or might be able to know about loanwords from Finnic into Baltic and Germanic and between Germanic and Baltic. All in all, through a multidisciplinary approach we were able to gain new insights into the well-studied topic of the Finnic past, showing that more of this kind of research is needed in the future.