Kalevi Wiik

Kaino Kalevi Wiik (2 August 1932, Turku — 12 September 2015, Turku) was a professor of phonetics at the University of Turku, Finland. He was best known for his controversial hypothesis about the effect of the Uralic contact influence on the creation of various Indo-European protolanguages in Northern Europe such as Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic. He also based much of his hypothetical structures on results of genetics. Ludomir R. Lozny states, "Wiik's controversial ideas are rejected by the majority of the scholarly community, but they have attracted the enormous interest of a wider audience."

Wiik proposed Indo-European origins in Southeast Europe by using linguistic, genetic, archaeological and anthropological data to support his hypotheses. He believed that from 23,000 to 8000 BC (the last ice age), inhabitation in Europe was in three main regions during the Last Glacial Maximum, and their populations then came to divide Europe between themselves.

Western 'Basque' Europe and Northern 'Uralic' Europe were inhabited by hunters of large animals that were abundant. The people spoke languages related respectively to modern Basque and Uralic. The rest of Europe was inhabited by hunters of smaller animals and fragmented into many smaller unknown languages.

By 5500 BC, the extinction of many large species of animals reduced the inhabitants of Western Europe and Northern Europe to hunting small game. The inhabitants of South-East Europe (hypothesised to have spread from the Balkans]]) had adopted the Neolithic way of life of mixed farming and animal husbandry and were becoming economically more successful. Early farmers diffusing from Greece and the Balkans gave rise to Indo-European, serving as a lingua franca of the inhabitants of region and displacing or gradually converting linguistically the less successful hunters from the other regions.

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