The West-Finnic tribes as shown on the map spoke Finno-Samic languages. Linguistically these tribes rather belong to Baltic-Finnic languages and Sami languages.
Anyway, round year 600 these branches of the Uralic languages were spoken on large areas in the northern Europe.
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The Avars, as shown on the map, played a big role in the medieval South-Eastern Europe. Around year 600, the are of influence was as biggest. Originally there’s no information of their language, or ethnolinguistical affiliation. Much later they shifted to start speaking [Proto-]Slavic language.
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Oguri, Kutriguri, Utriguri, and Saraguri were all Turcic tribes speaking Turkic languages.
Agathias — the principal historian of part of the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian I between 552 and 558 — wrote: “…all of them are called in general Scythians and Huns in particular according to their nation. Thus, some are Koutrigours or Outigours and yet others are Oultizurs and Bourougounds… the Oultizurs and Bourougounds were known up to the time of the Emperor Leo (457–474) and the Romans of that time and appeared to have been strong. We, however, in this day, neither know them, nor, I think, will we. Perhaps, they have perished or perhaps they have moved off to very far place.”
Click on the link below to see, where the cited tribes lived, whether they had “perished or moved off to very far place“.
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I visited a small museum in Helsinki with an exhibition of textiles of a Finnish fashion designer Jukka Rintala. In the museum cellar I happened to find old statues from different cultures.
One of the statues originated from the Hittite culture, and was dated from 2000 BC. The language of Hittites, the Hittite language, was an Indo-European language, belonging to the Anatolian language branch.
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I had to check twice when I saw the word “thraco-phrygian”. Where are they supposed to live in Europe?
The Merriam Webster dictionary defines Thraco-Phrygian as an adjective “of, relating to, or constituting a tentative branch of the Indo-European language family to which are sometimes assigned various languages of the Balkans and Asia Minor not otherwise assignable”
So they were living on the Balkans, and browsing on the Ethnohistory map found them there 1500BC.
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Today Slavic languages are spoken in Eastern Europe, in countries like Russia, Poland, Czech, and Serbia, to name a few. But almost a thousand year earlier there lived Slavic speaking tribes close to today’s Netherlands. See the map below and compare it with today’s political borders.
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The oldest runestones in Sweden are written in a language that was called Old Scandinavian (or Proto Norse). In that time the language was understtod throughout Scandinavia.
I visited one of the runestones in Järsberg, Sweden, in the summer. And I encountered a verbform that is still easily read today: ᚹᚫᚱᛁᛏᚢ writu (write). So despite the almost 1500 years there is still something very common with the language.
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I visited during the summer holidays the perhaps best known runestone in Sweden. The stone is called “Rök runestone” and has both an impressive size and a lot of Runic Swedish in its inscription. Runic Swedish was the predecessor of today’s Swedish and it was spoken 1000 years ago.
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We know that the Arabs and Jews speak Semitic languages. And the Arabic speaking tribes conquered much of the Iberian peninsula around AD700.
But there were Semitic speaking tribes in Europe much before, the Carthaginians. They establised colonies around the Mediterranean and were finally crushed by the ancient Romans much later. Anyway around 500BC the Semitic tribes — represented by the Carthaginians — had a strong presence on the shores of the Mediterranean, as shown on the map.
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The Ligurian language was spoken in pre-Roman times and into the Roman era by an ancient people known as the Ligures.
Very little is known about this language which is generally believed to have been Indo-European.
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