The
Nordwestblock (English "North-West Block"), is a hypothetical cultural region, that several 20th century scholars propose as a
prehistoric culture, thought to be roughly bounded by the rivers
Meuse,
Elbe,
Somme and
Oise (the present-day
Netherlands,
Belgium, northern
France and western
Germany) during the Bronze and Iron Ages (3rd to 1st millennia BC, up to the gradual onset of historical sources from the 1st century).
The theory was first proposed in 1962 by Rolf Hachmann, an historian, Georg Kossack, an archeologist, and Hans Kuhn, a linguist.[1] They continued the work of the Belgian linguist Maurits Gysseling, who got his inspiration from the Belgian archeologist Siegfried De Laet. Gysseling's original proposal included research that another language may have existed somewhere in between Germanic and Celtic in the Belgian (sic) region.[2]
The term itself Nordwestblock was coined by the German linguist, Hans Kuhn[3], who considered the inhabitants of this area neither Germanic nor Celtic, thus attributing to the people a distinct ethnicity or culture. According to Kuhn and his followers, the region was Germanised from the beginning of the Common Era, at the latest.
Concerning the language spoken by the Iron Age Nordwestblock population, Kuhn speculated on linguistic affinity to the Venetic language, other hypotheses connect the Northwestblock with the Raetic ("Tyrsenian") or generic Centum Indo-European (Illyrian, "Old European"). Gysseling suspected an intermediate Belgian language between Germanic and Celtic, that might have been affiliated to Italic. According to Luc van Durme, a Belgian linguist, toponymic evidence to a former Celtic presence in the Low Countries is near to utterly absent.[4] However, most linguistic features proposed to sustain a separate Indo-European language, including tribenames like "Belgian", could be derived from both proto-Germanic and proto-Celtic.
