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Italic languages

Italic
Latino-Sabine, Italic–Venetic
Geographic
distribution		Originally the Italian Peninsula and parts of modern day Austria and Switzerland, today Southern Europe, Latin America, France, Romania, Moldova, Canada, and the official languages of half the countries of Africa.
EthnicityOriginally the Italic peoples
Linguistic classificationIndo-European
Proto-languageProto-Italic
Subdivisions
Language codes
ISO 639-5itc
Glottologital1284
Main linguistic groups in Iron-Age Italy and the surrounding areas. Some of those languages have left very little evidence, and their classification is quite uncertain. The Punic language brought to Sardinia by the Punics coexisted with the indigenous and non-Italic Paleo-Sardinian, or Nuragic.

The Italic languages form a branch of the Indo-European language family, whose earliest known members were spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The most important of the ancient Italic languages was Latin, the official language of ancient Rome, which conquered the other Italic peoples before the common era.[1] The other Italic languages became extinct in the first centuries AD as their speakers were assimilated into the Roman Empire and shifted to some form of Latin. Between the third and eighth centuries AD, Vulgar Latin (perhaps influenced by substrata from the other Italic languages) diversified into the Romance languages, which are the only Italic languages natively spoken today, while Literary Latin also survived.[2]

Besides Latin, the known ancient Italic languages are Faliscan (the closest to Latin), Umbrian and Oscan (or Osco-Umbrian), and South Picene. Other Indo-European languages once spoken in the peninsula whose inclusion in the Italic branch is disputed are Venetic and Siculian. These long-extinct languages are known only from inscriptions in archaeological finds.[3][4]

In the first millennium BC, several (other) non-Italic languages were spoken in the peninsula, including members of other branches of Indo-European (such as Celtic and Greek) as well as at least one non-Indo-European one, Etruscan.

It is generally believed that those 1st millennium Italic languages descend from Indo-European languages brought by migrants to the peninsula sometime in the 2nd millennium BC through Bell Beaker and Urnfield culture groups north and east of the Alps.[5][6][7][6] However, the source of those migrations and the history of the languages in the peninsula are still a matter of debate among historians. In particular, it is debated whether the ancient Italic languages all descended from a single Proto-Italic language after its arrival in the region, or whether the migrants brought two or more Indo-European languages that were only distantly related.

With over 800 million native speakers, the Romance languages make Italic the second-most-widely spoken branch of the Indo-European family, after Indo-Iranian. However, in academia the ancient Italic languages form a separate field of study from the medieval and modern Romance languages. This article focuses on the ancient languages. For information on the academic study of the Romance languages, see Romance studies.[8]

Most Italic languages (including Romance) are generally written in Old Italic scripts (or the descendant Latin alphabet and its adaptations), which descend from the alphabet used to write the non-Italic Etruscan language, and ultimately from the Greek alphabet. The notable exceptions are Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is sometimes written in the Hebrew, Greek, or Cyrillic script, and some forms of Romanian, which are written in the Cyrillic script.

  1. ^ "Italic Languages". obo. Retrieved 9 March 2023.
  2. ^ Sturtevant, E. H. (13 December 1920). "The Italic Languages". The Classical Weekly. 14 (9): 66–69. doi:10.2307/4388079. JSTOR 4388079. Retrieved 2 May 2023.
  3. ^ S. Beeler, Madison (1952). "The Relation of Latin and Osco-Umbrian". Language. 28 (4): 435–443. doi:10.2307/409679. JSTOR 409679. Retrieved 2 May 2023.
  4. ^ FERRISS-HILL, JENNIFER L. (2011). "Virgil's Program of Sabellic Etymologizing and the Construction of Italic Identity". Transactions of the American Philological Association. 141 (2): 265–284. doi:10.1353/apa.2011.0016. JSTOR 41289745. S2CID 161961761. Retrieved 2 May 2023.
  5. ^ Mallory & Adams 1997, p. 314–319.
  6. ^ a b Bossong 2017, p. 859.
  7. ^ Fortson 2004, p. 245.
  8. ^ Manning, Eugene W. (1892). "Romance Languages". Modern Language Notes. 7 (5): 158. doi:10.2307/2918378. JSTOR 2918378. Retrieved 2 May 2023.

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