11-17-2023, 05:23 PM
The reason I find the Germanic urheimat in southern Scandinavia has nothing to do with Finnic borrowings but rather dialectal. If Germanic came from the south into Scandinavia, they would find the descendants of the Battle-Axe Culture there, who were derived from Corded Ware and therefore spoke an Indo-European dialect. If speakers of a southern Germanic dialect that was ancestral to proto-Norse encountered this people, the resulting Early North Germanic would diverge sharply from western Germanic, which is not the case. English underwent change at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period due to the Viking invasion because the early East Norse spoken by the Vikings who settled the Danelaw, a North Germanic language, was still somewhat intelligible to speakers of Anglo-Saxon, a West Germanic language. The main area of Germanic origin appears to me to be in southern Sweden and Denmark, with West Germanic splitting when migrations to the south encountered people speaking Nordwestblock languages, and East Germanic splitting, of course, when they crossed the Baltic, but as there were fewer inhabitants there (shout out to my M458 cousins that were among the few, though), it took longer for the dialects to diverge and Biblical Gothic thus appears to be more primitive.