According to a Ph.D thesis by Mikko Heikkilä: "An archaic (Northwest-)Indo-European language and a subsequently
extinct Paleo-European language were likely spoken in what is now called
Finland and Estonia, when the linguistic ancestors of the Finns and the
Sami arrived in the eastern and northern Baltic Sea region from the
Volga-Kama region probably at the beginning of the Bronze Age." (Ph.D thesis download).
The abstract of the Ph.D thesis:
My academic dissertation "Bidrag till Fennoskandiens språkliga
förhistoria i tid och rum" ("Spatiotemporal Contributions to the
Linguistic Prehistory of Fennoscandia") is an interdisciplinary study of
the linguistic prehistory of Northern Europe chiefly in the Iron Age
(ca. 700 BC―AD 1200), but also to some extent in the Bronze Age (ca.
1700―700 BC) and the Early Finnish Middle Ages (ca. AD 1200―1323). The
disciplines represented in this study are Germanistics, Nordistics,
Finnougristics, history and archaeology. The language-forms studied are
Proto-Germanic, Proto-Scandinavian, Proto-Finnic and Proto-Sami. This
dissertation uses historical-comparative linguistics and especially
loanword study to examine the relative and absolute chronology of the
sound changes that have taken place in the proto-forms of the Germanic,
Finnic and Samic languages. Phonetic history is the basis of historical
linguistics studying the diachronic development of languages. To my
knowledge, this study is the first in the history of the disciplines
mentioned above to examine the systematic dating of the phonetic
development of these proto-languages in relation to each other. In
addition to the dating and relating of the phonetic development of the
proto-languages, I study Fennoscandian toponyms. The oldest datable and
etymologizable place-names throw new light on the ethnic history and
history of settlement of Fennoscandia. For instance, I deal with the
etymology of the following place-names: Ahvenanmaa/Åland, Eura(joki),
Inari(järvi), Kemi(joki), Kvenland, Kymi(joki), Sarsa, Satakunta,
Vanaja, Vantaa and Ähtäri.
My dissertation shows that Proto-Germanic, Proto-Scandinavian,
Proto-Finnic and Proto-Sami all date to different periods of the Iron
Age. I argue that the present study along with my earlier published
research also proves that a (West-)Uralic language – the pre-form of the
Finnic and Samic languages – was spoken in the region of the
present-day Finland in the Bronze Age, but not earlier than that. In the
centuries before the Common Era, Proto-Sami was spoken in the whole
region of what is now called Finland, excluding Lapland. At the
beginning of the Common Era, Proto-Sami was spoken in the whole region
of Finland, including Southern Finland, from where the Sami idiom first
began to recede. An archaic (Northwest-)Indo-European language and a
subsequently extinct Paleo-European language were likely spoken in what
is now called Finland and Estonia, when the linguistic ancestors of the
Finns and the Sami arrived in the eastern and northern Baltic Sea region
from the Volga-Kama region probably at the beginning of the Bronze Age.
For example, the names Suomi ʻFinlandʼ and Viro ʻEstoniaʼ are likely to
have been borrowed from the Indo-European idiom in question.
(Proto-)Germanic waves of influence have come from Scandinavia to
Finland since the Bronze Age. A considerable part of the Finnic and
Samic vocabulary is indeed Germanic loanwords of different ages which
form strata in these languages. Besides mere etymological research,
these numerous Germanic loanwords make it possible to relate to each
other the temporal development of the language-forms that have been in
contact with each other. That is what I have done in my extensive
dissertation, which attempts to be both a detailed and a holistic
treatise."
A discussion is already going on on Dienekes blogspot.
Any comments here?