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Rise of Germanic and Celtic languages is written in ancient DNA
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Aghascrebagh Ogham Stone in Northern Ireland shows much-worn inscriptions.Credit: Radharc Images/Alamy
More than one billion people worldwide speak Germanic languages such as English, German and Dutch, whereas Celtic languages — including Welsh, Irish and Gaelic — are spoken by only two or three million people, mostly in northern Europe.
A pair of studies analysing more than 4,700 ancient human genomes has now identified the possible origins of Celtic1 and Germanic2 and found migrations that might have dispersed their speakers around Europe — partly explaining their distribution today. The papers were published in Nature on 4 November.
Linguistic and archaeological studies have indicated that Celtic languages were widespread across Europe about 2,500 years ago, reaching into present-day Italy, Spain and France. Speakers of early Germanic languages might have been limited to a pocket of northern Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea coast some 3,000 years ago.
“We wanted to kind of see how this change occurs. How does the range swap through time?” says Hugh McColl, a population geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author of both studies.
How one language family took over the world: ancient DNA traces its spread
Linguists have previously proposed that migrations played some part in the dispersal of Germanic and Celtic. But Guus Kroonen, a historical linguist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and a co-author of both studies, says that there are other ways for languages to spread. “You can easily adopt a new language without changing your genes.”
McColl, Kroonen and their colleagues looked for signs of migration through shifts in the ancestry of ancient population groups. To do so, they used newly sequenced genomes from more than 700 people, alongside published data from more than 4,000 ancient humans.
The researchers identified an enigmatic population that migrated to Sweden around 4,000 years ago, possibly from Baltic regions. They found that the presence of this ancestry in Scandinavia and its spread throughout Europe was consistent with previous linguistic theories and archaeological evidence. “It’s a good tracer dye for the spread of Germanic languages,” says Kroonen.