The prehistoric multilingual speaker: What can we know about the multilingualism of Proto-Uralic speakers?

In the tradition of historical Uralistics, the silent assumption seems to be that the speaker communities of reconstructed proto-languages were (predominantly) monolingual. The presence of other languages is only taken into account in loanword studies and in con- nection with hypothesized language shifts (as in the so-called Proto-Lapp hypothesis, to explain linguistic relatedness between “racially” different speaker populations). This assumption may arise from the underlying ideologies of Romantic Nationalism, or from field linguists’ experiences with endangered and dying languages. It is also connected to the traditions of ethnic archaeology which emphasized continuity of settlement and led to the reconstruction of large and linguistically stable primeval homes. However, it seems increasingly probable that prehistoric speaker communities were small, surroun- ded by other languages and possibly multilingual. Moreover, prehistoric multilingual speakers probably understood their languages as distinct codes, which means that lateral transmission (borrowing) was not free or unconstrained. Traces of prehistoric multilingualism are not easy to identify, but systematic searches for substratum in the oldest lexical layers, perhaps even for typological anomalies, might provide avenues for further research.