  We present spectroscopic observations of a sample of faint Gigahertz Peaked
Spectrum (GPS) radio sources drawn from the Westerbork Northern Sky Survey
(WENSS). Redshifts have been determined for 19 (40%) of the objects. The
optical spectra of the GPS sources identified with low redshift galaxies show
deep stellar absorption features. This confirms previous suggestions that their
optical light is not significantly contaminated by AGN-related emission, but is
dominated by a population of old (>9 Gyr) and metal-rich (>0.2 [Fe/H]) stars,
justifying the use of these (probably) young radio sources as probes of galaxy
evolution. The optical spectra of GPS sources identified with quasars are
indistinguishable from those of flat spectrum quasars, and clearly different
from the spectra of Compact Steep Spectrum (CSS) quasars. The redshift
distribution of the GPS quasars in our radio-faint sample is comparable to that
of the bright samples presented in the literature, peaking at z ~ 2-3. It is
unlikely that a significant population of low redshift GPS quasars is missed
due to selection effects in our sample. We therefore claim that there is a
genuine difference between the redshift distributions of GPS galaxies and
quasars, which, because it is present in both the radio-faint and bright
samples, can not be due to a redshift-luminosity degeneracy. It is therefore
unlikely that the GPS quasars and galaxies are unified by orientation, unless
the quasar opening angle is a strong function of redshift. We suggest that the
GPS quasars and galaxies are unrelated populations and just happen to have
identical observed radio-spectral properties, and hypothesise that GPS quasars
are a sub-class of flat spectrum quasars.
