Introduction

From the perspective of a relatively scarcely populated region on the southern shore of Austmarr, the Baltic Sea, away from the main European traffic streams of today, one may have the impression of being at the periphery of the modern world, far away from the cultural and political centres that spread new trends. It seems hard to imagine that it was indeed this very region, with its Hanseatic cities, that gave or at least mediated the major cultural and political impulses to the Nordic countries, including Finland, over several centuries. For Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, as well as the Baltic countries of Estonia and Latvia, this has never been doubted. In the field of political, religious, and material culture, Finland joins this circle naturally. With respect to language contact, however, the direct influence of Low German on Finnish has often been denied or at least intentionally minimised, although the first attempts to establish Low German loanwords in Finnish date from the beginning of the twentieth century (e.g. Karsten 1909: 244; cf. Bentlin 2008: 29). Instead, the existence of words of Low German origin was ascribed to mediation through Swedish. Therefore, it can be seen as a major outcome of the reception of my Ph.D. thesis (2008) that linguistic evidence can be seen as so strong that reasonable doubt about Low German influence on Finnish can no longer be maintained (cf. Stellmacher 2008: 301; Häkkinen 2013: 25). Consequently, the first introductory books for students have accepted the Low German loanword layer in Finnish as a fact to be added to the traditionally listed strata when talking about loans in Finnish (see e.g. Häkkinen 2011: 81-82).

Despite the generally very positive reception that this thesis has received, I am not aware of any attempts to investigate further any questions in this specific linguistic context. Therefore, I see good reason to revisit the topic at a distance of several years since the first publication.