Kalevi Wiik

Kalevi Wiik is a professor emeritus of phonetics at the University of Turku, Finland. He is best known for his controversial theories about the origins of the Finno-Ugric languages. Like Marija Gimbutas before him, he has tried to combine archaeology with linguistics in order to locate the origins of European peoples.

Views

Wiik proposes [ [http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/bff/399/wiik.html] Europe's oldest language? - Kalevi Wiik] Indo-European origins in Southeast Europe, using linguistic, genetical, archaeological and anthropological data to support his theory. He believes that from 23,000-8,000 BC, Europe was divided into three main regions. Western 'Basque' Europe and Northern 'Uralic' Europe were inhabited by hunters of large animals which were abundant during that period and spoke languages related respectively to modern Basque and Finno-Ugric. The rest of Europe was inhabited by hunters of smaller animals and was fragmented into many smaller unknown languages.

By 5,500BC the extinction of many large species of animals reduced the inhabitants of the Western and Northern regions to hunting small-game. The inhabitants of South-East Europe had adopted the Neolithic way of life of mixed farming and animal husbandry and were becoming economically more successful. Early farmers diffusing from Greece and the Balkans gave rise to Indo-European, serving as a lingua franca of the inhabitants of region X and displacing or gradually converting linguistically the less successful hunters from the other regions.

At the periphery of the Indo-European language expansion, the Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Celtic and Iberian languages were formed; these were Indo-European flavored with many elements from the languages of the hunters: Basque and Finno-Ugric. He identifies the Post-Swiderian people (originating from western Poland) as Finnic-Ugric, and the Saami as migrants from (Magdalenian) Western Europe that changed their original language, probably Basque-like, to an Uralic tongue.

Thus, eventually most of Europe was Indo-Europeanized as the Basque and Finno-Ugric speaking hunters adopted IE languages. Only in the periphery of the European continent, in the Iberian peninsula and in Northeast Europe strong nuclei of hunters apparently adopted farming without being linguistically converted: modern Basque and Finnish speakers are descendants of mostly these early hunters of the Ice Age. Everywhere else, the Indo-European languages which originated in Southeast Europe have won the upper hand.

In “Where Did European Men Come From” [ [http://www.jogg.info/41/Wiik.pdf] Where Did European Men Come From - Kalevi Wiik, Journal of Genetic Genealogy, 4:35-85, 2008)] Wiik surveyed Y chromosome variation in Europeans and in accordance with his position that “The men of the Balkan refuge were more likely than those of any other to have spoken an early form of the Indo-European language.”

Footnotes

External links

* [http://www.wiik.fi/kalevi Wiik's home page]