About Proto-Germanic

[Anglesqueville]

3. Saami
The Saami languages have their share of proto-Germanic lexical borrowings. Even if this share is considerably less important than that of Proto-Finnic, it is nonetheless rich in lessons (and questions). In his 2006 text ("On Germanic-Saami contacts and Saami prehistory") Ante Aikio notes:

Jorma Koivulehto has demonstrated in his studies that there are two distinct strata of Germanic loanwords in Saami which precede the extensive stratum of Proto-Scandinavian loans, the existence of which has already for long been recognised. Even these older borrowings seem to have been adopted largely independent of Finnic, as most of them do not have Finnic cognates.

In detail the study of the problem of Germanic loanwords in Saami is difficult, and I'll refer to the texts of Aikio. It is, however, safe to say that the pre-proto-Saami speakers, who had travelled by the North-Western route, first settled throughout southern Finland where they encountered the native Germanic speakers. The time of this meeting cannot be very different from that when the common "German-Finnic" history began. But they may not coincide. One can in particular think that the first Germano-Saami meetings occurred before the pre-proto-Finnic speakers established, coming from Estonia, their first Finnish colonies. This is what Aikio suggests:

One thus arrives at the picture that Proto-Saami originally developed in an area situated between the known Germanic and Finnic language groups and the unknown Palaeo-European cultures of Northern Europe (see Map )

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I strongly advise studying the founding texts of Aikio, namely "An essay on Saami ethnolinguistic prehistory" and the one already quoted, which contains many fascinating etymologies. But it's time now for bringing an answer to the question implicitly contained in the title of this thread.