Nordwestblock

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Nordwestblock" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Nordwestblock (German, "Northwest Block") is a hypothetical Northwestern European cultural region that some scholars propose as a prehistoric culture in the present-day Netherlands, Belgium, far-northern France, and northwestern Germany, in an area approximately bounded by the Somme, Oise, Meuse and Elbe rivers, possibly extending to the eastern part of what is now England,^{[citation needed]} during the Bronze and Iron Ages from the 3rd to the 1st millennia BCE, up to the onset of historical sources, in the 1st century BCE.

The theory was first proposed by two authors working independently: Hans Kuhn^[1] and Maurits Gysseling, whose proposal included research indicating that another language may have existed somewhere in between Germanic and Celtic in the Belgian region.^[2]

The term Nordwestblock itself was coined by Hans Kuhn,^[3] who considered the inhabitants of the area neither Germanic nor Celtic and so attributed to the people a distinct ethnicity or culture up to the Iron Age. So far, this has not been proven or disproven.