According to Aikio, the speakers of the
Proto-Sámi language arrived in
Lapland around 650 BC and fully assimilated the local
Paleo-European populations by the middle of 1st millennium AD. In his opinion, the detailed reconstruction of these languages is impossible. more than 1,000 loanwords from Paleo-Laplandic likely exist. Many toponyms in
Sápmi originate from Paleo-Laplandic. Because Sámi language etymologies for
reindeers have preserved a large number of words from Paleo-Laplandic, this suggests that Paleo-Laplandic groups influenced Sámi culture. Paleo-Lakelandic was likely distinguished into an Eastern and a Western language group, as Eastern Sámi substrate words differ phonetically from those of Western Sámi. Most of these words have
cognates in all Sámi languages. A more extensive list of such words can be found in
G. M. Kert's 2009 work on Sámi toponymics. Semantically, pre-Sámi substrate consists mostly of basic vocabulary terms (i.e. human body parts) and nature/animal names, and lacks terms of kinship and societal organization, which suggests a rather low level of socioeconomic development in pre-Sámi cultures.
Paleo-Lakelandic Another group, the Paleo-Lakelandic languages, are a hypothetical group of languages similar to the Paleo-Laplandic languages which influenced the Sámi languages more South, that were later assimilated by
Finnic people. Nevertheless, the Sámi substrate vocabulary in
Finnish reveals many words of unknown origin which derive from the Paleo-European languages spoken in the region. Words such as *kāvë 'bend' and *šāpšë have been identified as originating in Paleo-Lakelandic.
Paleo-Baltic The Paleo-Baltic languages are a group of languages that have been proposed to have existed in the Baltic region prior to the migrations of the Indo-Europeans and Finno-Ugrians, that have been hypothesized to have influenced the
Baltic and
Finnic languages. Among the suggested loanwords from a pre-Baltic language include the Finnic words
saari 'island',
niemi 'cape' and
jänis 'hare', A list of words suggested by Saarikivi as having Paleo-Baltic origin: It has been suggested that the Paleo-European language of the Baltic was perhaps related to Paleo-Laplandic, either by influence or by genetic relationship, particularly the words for "moss" and "island" have been suggested as cognates between Paleo-Laplandic and Paleo-Baltic. Some words in Finno-Volgaic languages contain rare consonant clusters, which suggests loanwords from unknown languages. Finnish words such as
jauho ('flour'),
lehmä ('cow'),
tähti ('star'),
tammi ('oak') and
ihminen ('human') could be substrate words. Aikio (2021) lists some other substrate vocabulary as:{{cite conference |last=Luobbal |first=Sámmol Sámmol Ánte |author-link=Ante Aikio |conference=Sub-Indo-European Europe: Problems, Methods and Evidence |location=Leiden, Netherlands |date=2021 |title=The layers of substrate vocabulary in Western Uralic Irregular correspondences among Uralic languages are frequent among some words, such as 'to milk' and '
hazelnut'. These are presumed to be non-native loanwords by Aikio (2021): == Toponyms ==