Tuna Revisited. The place-name Tuna, the diffusion of linguistic innovations and the emergence of central places in Northern Europe during the first millennium A.D.

The place-names in -tuna are well known but have not been subject to much interest from linguists or onomasticians in recent years. The only major investigation is now nearly 50 years old and in many aspects obsolete. At the same time, the place names in -tuna have gained increasing attention in the archaeological-historical discussion of central places during the first millennia AD. Such places were centres for power, craft and rituals and are vital for our understanding of the society of the time. The identification and conceptualisation of the central place has created a totally new context for the names in -tuna. In this project we will use this new knowledge and reassess the meaning and age of the place names. But we will also investigate whether the central places have functioned as redistributive nodes for linguistic innovations. This will be possible through an analysis of the special place-name environments in which they occur, environments of which the names in -tuna often are vital components. An important issue, which such an analysis might elucidate, is if there are European models, parallels or similarities for the tuna-names and for the central places as such.