Preliminaries: Extraterritorial languages

General concepts

An extraterritorial language (henceforth ETL) is one that has been transported from its original geographical home to another area. If we take this concept to its logical conclusion, all human languages spoken outside of East Africa are extraterritorial (henceforth ET) versions of whatever was spoken by the first anatomically modern Homo sapiens who left Africa about 60,000 years ago. This kind of historical depth is unavailable to language historians, and the notion is generally applied over relatively shorter time-spans.

But it is useful in the fairly long term; for example, Icelandic, though an ‘autonomous’ language (in the sense that it is not intercomprehensible with any other Scandinavian language) still bears the marks of being ninth-century ET Norwegian; and English itself (in all its varieties) could be considered to be ET North-Sea Germanic, since it was brought to the British Isles from the continent in the fifth century; indeed this origin accounts for the particular features it shares with Frisian in particular, Dutch, and somewhat less with German. Its ET origin is the key that unlocks its prehistory.