Baltic identity crisis: dangerous politicisation of languages | Opinion
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Baltic identity crisis: dangerous politicisation of languages | Opinion

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Some scientists from Poland and Russia believe that Baltic languages are not native to the Baltic region

Renowned British historians, like Prof. Robert Frost, make attempts to study the history of the Baltics from a Polish perspective (Jagiellonian University). A perspective which throughout the history has made numerous attempts to polonise the Baltics. This approach makes it even more distasteful and damaging to the Baltic identity.

There are quite a few academics in Poland and Russia who are of the opinion that Baltic languages are not native to this region and that prior to the arrival of the Baltic tribes somewhere in 2800 BCE, Finnic tribes had already lived in this area.

This theory remains inconsistent, because if the Balto-Slavic people, like the Kurgan hypothesis suggests, came to this region more or less at the same time, they would have had contact with these Finnic people also at the same time. If not, then the Balto-Slavic grouping cannot be made, which means that the Baltic tribes came to this region either before or after the Slavic and Finnic people, so the Baltic languages would have unlikely undergone common development with the Slavic languages via a contact route.

What also remains inconsistent is that there are no archaeological or linguistic traces for any Finnic people to have ever lived in these lands. In contrast, Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994), a renowned archaeologist, has presented significant archaeological findings ranging from eastern shores of the Baltic Sea to western Russia, and linguistic evidence, such as the Baltic hydronyms spanning this whole region.

This suggests that the Baltic people inhabited these lands long before the supposed arrival of the Finnic or Slavic tribes, which subsequently inherited these names.

Tomas Dūminis
Dr. Tomas Dūminis, the BR guest author is a scientist and as a hobby he writes about Baltic Anthropology.

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