Germanic Substrate Hypothesis

The Germanic substrate hypothesis is an attempt to explain the distinctive nature of the Germanic languages within the context of the Indo-European language family. It postulates that the elements of the common Germanic vocabulary and syntactical forms that do not seem to have an Indo-European origin show Proto-Germanic to be a creole language: a contact language synthesis between Indo-European speakers and a non-Indo-European substrate language used by the ancestors of the speakers of the Proto-Germanic language. The theory was first proposed by Sigmund Feist in 1932, who estimated that roughly a third of Proto-Germanic lexical items came from a non-Indo-European substrate and that the supposed reduction of the Proto-Germanic inflectional system was the result of pidginization with that substrate. The culture and tribes from which the substrate material originated continues to be a subject of academic debate and study. Notable candidates for possible substrate culture(s) are the Ertebølle culture, Funnelbeaker culture, Pitted Ware culture and the Corded Ware culture, but also the oldest cultures of northern Europe like the Hamburgian, the first distinct culture identified of this region.