Ancient DNA dates the arrival of the Germanic languages in Scandinavia to 4,000 years ago

In brief 3 key points

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• An unknown migration reached Sweden from the Baltic around 2000 BC
• It may have brought the ancestor of the Germanic languages
• DNA cannot show what language anyone spoke

A previously unknown migration into Scandinavia around 4,000 years ago may have brought the ancestor of English, German, Dutch and the Nordic languages. A team led by the University of Copenhagen and Leiden University reports this in Nature. They sequenced 712 ancient genomes and analysed them with 4,009 published ones.

The newcomers probably came from the Baltic region. They reached Sweden by about 2000 BC and had spread across Scandinavia by about 1550 BC. The team suggests they may have carried the earliest form of Germanic.

Eight centuries later than assumed

Scholars have long linked the Germanic languages to the first steppe-related migrations into the region, around 3000 to 2500 BC. That left a gap of two to three thousand years before the first runic inscriptions, the earliest written Germanic, around AD 1 to 400. The new date puts the arrival about 800 years later than traditionally assumed.

“We discovered a previously unknown migration that occurred at exactly the time and place where we would expect the earliest form of Germanic to be spreading.”

Hugh McColl, Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, lead author

The DNA also tracks later moves. By about AD 300, people from southern Scandinavia were moving south into Germany, Poland and the Netherlands, areas thought to have spoken Celtic. In the Migration Period, between about AD 375 and 575, the same ancestry appears among Anglo-Saxons in Britain and Langobards in southern Europe.

A wave into Denmark before the Vikings

In the same period, people from what is now northern Germany moved north into Denmark and southern Sweden. On Zealand they became a major part of the population. The move coincides with the emergence of Old Norse, the language of the Vikings.

The researchers suggest many Danish and Swedish Vikings descended largely from these newcomers. They were close relatives of groups that also contributed to the Anglo-Saxons. The team thinks this may help explain shared art styles and closely related languages in Viking Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England.

“This migration came as a real surprise. Archaeologists and linguists had not predicted it, but it helps explain several cultural and linguistic connections between Scandinavia and Britain that have puzzled researchers for a long time.”

Hugh McColl

The authors stress the limits. DNA does not show which language people spoke. The links to Germanic and Old Norse come from matching the timing of migrations with linguistic and archaeological evidence.

“DNA sequences do not tell us directly which language people spoke. But by combining ancient DNA with linguistic and archaeological evidence, we can begin to trace how languages spread and changed over thousands of years.”

Eske Willerslev, Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, senior author

A companion study in Nature used the same data on the Celtic languages. It points to a westward movement from central Europe around 3,000 years ago.

Sources (2)

Peer-reviewed paperfrom University of Copenhagen and Leiden University

• Ancient DNA traces origins of English, German and Scandinavian languages (Phys.org)
• Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibilit (Nature)

Paper: McColl, H., Willerslev, E. et al. Tracing the spread of Germanic languages using ancient genomics. Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09064-1

Edited by Guiseppe Weijermars

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ancient dnalanguagesscandinaviavikingsanglo-saxons

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