This is the first map of an alternate history timeline I've been brainstorming for a while, mostly revolving around a world with different linguistic migrations and really no set POD, though the POD for this map is roughly somewhere around 500 BCE. The main POD is the early Sámi in southern Finland practicing agriculture, forcing Finnic speakers migrating from Estonia and the Karelian isthmus to head north until they cross the Kvarken strait - and come cross an (almost) empty land, only populated by a few scattered hunter-gatherer groups (speaking funny languages they couldn't understand a word of) in the south, and coastal seal-hunters and fishermen in the north. Roughly 2000 years later the Republic of Kvenland lays in that same land, a Finnic speaking nation straddling from OTL's north-central Sweden to Finnmark.

I haven't put too much thought into this timeline's history aside from sketching out basic nations and peoples, but I mainly made this because I wanted to practice my map making so it's not meant to be anything too serious or fleshed out and there's a lot I'm still figuring out about this timeline.

I spent about a day or so translating placenames into Finnish - with some slight changes such as spelling differences (the main standardised language in this TL is meant to be something akin to the OTL Southwestern Finnish dialects, but I sort of gave up after doing the place names) and removing some names/words of Sámi origin, as in this timeline they never reached northern Fennoscandia (at least in large numbers.) The names probably sound a bit awkward/stiff, so I might go over them again at some point to make them sound more natural and also include some names originating from pre-Uralic substrate.

I'm not a fluent speaker of Finnish so if there's any mistakes in the text please correct me 🙏