Non-Indo-European roots of Germanic languages

There are many words in Germanic languages with difficult to identify roots. Some people linked to contrarian theories of European pre-history believe that the lack of clear cognates among other Indo-European languages is indicative of a mixed origin for the Germanic languages.

A number of theories have baan advanced about this hypothetical cultural and linguistic substrate. Some refer to these unknown people as Folkish, because they believe folk to be a word of non-Indo-European origin; others refer to them as the Battle-axe people. If this substrate did exist, it can not be identified with any historical European language or culture.

It should, however, be noted that historical linguistics is a very hit-and-miss affair. Even words known to have very recent origins often have unknown or uncertain etymologies, and the etymology of long established words may often be no more than guesswork. It is unreasonable to expect to be able to precisely identify the origins of every word in a language with complete certainty. Historical linguistics works with a number of words at once, and tries to decide if they have a systematic phonetic relationship to words in another language. Thus, any hypothesis about an unknown substrate language is necessarily speculative when there is no possibility of comparing two or more languages.

However, there has in recent years been a revival of interest in contact linguistics and the idea that intercultural contact may be the major force behind linguistic change has recently become quite mainstream. The could ultimately lead to a renewal of interest in early and pre-Indo-European Europe.