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".
Homeland hypotheses
Europe versus Siberia 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.Häkkinen, Jaakko 2007: Kantauralin murteutuminen vokaalivastaavuuksien valossak. 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) 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.Sebestyén-Németh, Irene 1951–1952: Zur Frage des alten Wohngebietes der uralischen Völker. They can be reconstructed already to Proto-Uralic, if Samoyedic is no longer seen as the first branch to split off.Häkkinen, Jaakko 2009: Kantauralin ajoitus ja paikannus: perustelut puntarissa. – Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Aikakauskirja 92, p. 9–56. http://www.sgr.fi/susa/92/hakkinen.pdf
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,Rédei, Károly 1986: Zu den indogermanisch-uralischen Sprachkontakten. (eds. Manfred Mayrhofer & Wolfgang U. Dressler.) Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Linguistik und Kommunikationsforschung, Heft 16. Wien.Koivulehto, Jorma 1991: Koivulehto, Jorma 1991: Uralische Evidenz für die Laryngaltheorie. Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse. Sitzungsberichte, 566. Band. Wien 1991. 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,Häkkinen, Jaakko 2012: Uralic evidence for the Indo-European homeland. which is seen as having arisen in the Poltavka culture of the Caspian steppes before its spread to Asia.Mallory, J. P. & Adams, D. Q. (editors) 1997: Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. p. 439
Bryant et al. (2005) equated the (ca. 5000–3650 BC) with the Proto-Uralic urheimat, and the following Volosovo culture (ca. 3650–1900 BC) with the Proto-Finno-Ugric urheimat.Edwin Bryant, Laurie L. Patton, The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History, Routledge 2005, p. 127 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.Parpola, Asko & Carpelan, Christian: The Cultural Counterparts to Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic and Proto-Aryan - Matching the dispersal and contact patterns in the linguistic and archaeological record, pp. 107–141, 2005 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.Koshmenko, MG: The Culture of Bronze Age Net Ware in Karelia. Fennoscandia Archaeologica, 1996, No. XIII, pp. 51-67. Helsinki: Finnish Archaeological Society. 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.Gimbutas, Marija: Bronze Age Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. The Hague, The Netherlands: Walter de Gruyter, 1965. p. 610Nordqvist, Kerkko & Herva, Vesa-Pekka & Ikäheimo, Janne & Lahelma, Antti: Early Copper Use in Neolithic North-Eastern Europe: An Overview. Estonian Journal of Archeology, 2012, 16th ed., No. 1, pp. 3–25. Tallinn, Tartu, Estonia: Estonian Academy of Sciences.Korjakova, Ludmila & Epimakhov, Andrei: The Urals and Western Siberia in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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.
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.Parpola, Asko: "The Face Urns of Gandhra and the Nâsatya Cult", Migrations, trade and peoples, Part 3, pp.149-162Antony, David W.: The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: The Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press, 2010.
It has been hypothesized that Pre-Proto-Uralic was spoken in Asia, on the basis of typological similarity with the Altaic SprachbundJanhunen, Juha 2001: Indo-Uralic and Ural-Altaic: On the diachronic implications of areal typology. – Carpelan, Parpola & Koskikallio (editors): Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations, p. 207–220. Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia 242. and hypothetical early contacts with the Yukaghir languages.Häkkinen, Jaakko 2012: Early contacts between Uralic and Yukaghir. Tiina Hyytiäinen, Lotta Jalava, Janne Saarikivi & Erika Sandman (editors): Per Urales ad Orientem Iter polyphonicum multilingue Festskrift tillägnad Juha Janhunen på hans sextioårsdag den 12 februari 2012. Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia 264, p. 91–101. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura. http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust264/sust264_hakkinenj.pdf 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.Aikio, Ante (2014). "The Uralic–Yukaghir lexical correspondences: genetic inheritance, language contact or chance resemblance?". Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen. 2014 (62): 7–76.
Continuity theories
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.Moora, Harri (editor) 1956: Eesti rahva etnilisest ajaloost. Tallinn. 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.Gallén, Jarl (editor) 1984: Suomen väestön esihistorialliset juuret. Tvärminnen symposiumi 17.–19.1.1980. Bidrag till kännedom av Finlands natur och folk, 131. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica. 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.Nuñez, Milton G. 1987: A Model for the Early Settlement of Finland. – Fennoscandia Archaeologica 4.Wiik, Kalevi 2002: Eurooppalaisten juuret. Jyväskylä: Atena.
However, in Indo-European studies, J. P. Mallory had already thoroughly scrutinized the methodological weaknesses of the continuity argumentation in 1989.Mallory, J. P. 1989: In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Language, Archaeology and Myth. London: Thames and Hudson. 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.Mallory, J. P. 2001: Uralics and Indo-Europeans: Problems of time and space. Carpelan et al. (edited): Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations, p. 345–366. Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia 242.Häkkinen, Jaakko 2006: Studying the Uralic proto-language. http://www.alkuperasivusto.fi/Uralic.html [Translation from: Uralilaisen kantakielen tutkiminen. – Tieteessä tapahtuu 1 / 2006, p. 52–58.]Häkkinen, Jaakko 2010: Jatkuvuusperustelut ja saamelaisen kielen leviäminen (OSA 1). – Muinaistutkija 1 / 2010, p. 19–36. http://www.alkuperasivusto.fi/Jatkuvuus1.pdf
At the same time, new linguistic results appeared to contradict the continuity theories: the datings of Proto-SaamiAikio, Ante 2004: An essay on substrate studies and the origin of Saami. – Irma Hyvärinen, Petri Kallio & Jarmo Korhonen (toim.): Etymologie, Entlehnungen und Entwicklungen. Festschrift für Jorma Koivulehto zum 70. Geburtstag, s. 5–34. Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, LXIII. Helsinki: Uusfilologinen yhdistys ry.Aikio, Ante 2006: On Germanic-Saami contacts and Saami prehistory. – Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Aikakauskirja 91, p. 9–55. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura. http://www.sgr.fi/susa/91/aikio.pdf and Proto-FinnicSaarikivi, Janne & Grünthal, Riho 2005: Itämerensuomalaisten kielten uralilainen tausta. Muuttuva muoto. Kirjoituksia Tapani Lehtisen 60-vuotispäivän kunniaksi, s. 111–146. Kieli 16. and of Proto-Uralic (Kallio 2006; Häkkinen 2009)Kallio, Petri 2006: Suomen kantakielten absoluuttista kronologiaa. – Virittäjä 1 / 2006, p. 2–25. http://www.kotikielenseura.fi/virittaja/hakemistot/jutut/2006_2.pdf are both clearly younger than it was thought in the framework of the continuity theories.