Proto-Italic period Proto-Italic was probably originally spoken by
Italic tribes north of the
Alps. In particular, early contacts with Celtic and Germanic speakers are suggested by linguistic evidence. Bakkum defines Proto-Italic as a "chronological stage" without an independent development of its own, but extending over late Proto-Indo-European and the initial stages of Proto-Latin and Proto-Sabellic. Meiser's dates of 4000 BC to 1800 BC, well before Mycenaean Greek, are described by him as being "as good a guess as anyone's". Schrijver argues for a Proto-Italo-Celtic stage, which he suggests was spoken in "approximately the first half or the middle of the 2nd millennium BC", from which Celtic split off first, then Venetic, before the remainder, Italic, split into Latino-Faliscan and Sabellian.
Italic peoples probably moved towards the
Italian Peninsula during the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, gradually reaching the southern regions. Although an equation between archeological and linguistic evidence cannot be established with certainty, the Proto-Italic language is generally associated with the
Terramare (1700–1150 BC) and
Proto-Villanovan culture (1200–900 BC).
Languages of Italy in the Iron Age brought to Sardinia by the
Punics coexisted with the indigenous and non-Italic
Paleo-Sardinian, or
Nuragic. At the start of the Iron Age, around 700 BC,
Ionian Greek settlers from
Euboea established colonies along the coast of southern Italy. They brought with them the
alphabet, which they had learned from the
Phoenicians; specifically, what we now call
Western Greek alphabet. The invention quickly spread through the whole peninsula, across language and political barriers. Local adaptations (mainly minor letter shape changes and the dropping or addition of a few letters) yielded several
Old Italic alphabets. The inscriptions show that, by 700 BC, many languages were spoken in the region, including members of several branches of Indo-European and several non-Indo-European languages. The most important of the latter was
Etruscan, attested by evidence from more than 10,000 inscriptions and some short texts. No relation has been found between Etruscan and any other known language, and there is still no clue about its possible origin (except for inscriptions on the island of
Lemnos in the eastern
Mediterranean). Other possibly non-Indo-European languages present at the time were Rhaetian in the
Alpine region,
Ligurian around present-day
Genoa, and some unidentified languages in
Sardinia. Those languages have left some detectable imprint in Latin. The largest language in southern Italy, except
Ionic Greek spoken in the Greek colonies, was
Messapian, known from some 260 inscriptions dating from the 6th and 5th centuries BC. There is a historical connection of Messapian with the
Illyrian tribes, added to the
archaeological connection in
ceramics and
metals existing between both peoples, which motivated the hypothesis of linguistic connection. But the evidence of Illyrian inscriptions is reduced to personal names and places, which makes it difficult to support such a hypothesis. It has also been proposed by some scholars, although not confirmed, that the
Lusitanian language may have belonged to the Italic family.
Timeline of Latin In the history of Latin of ancient times, there are several periods: • From the archaic period, several inscriptions of the 6th to the 4th centuries BC, fragments of the oldest laws, fragments from the sacral anthem of the
Salii, the anthem of the
Arval Brethren were preserved. • In the pre-classical period (3rd and 2nd centuries BC), the
literary Latin language (the comedies of
Plautus and
Terence, the
agricultural treatise of
Cato the Elder, fragments of works by a number of other authors) was based on the dialect of Rome. • The period of
classical ("golden") Latin dated until the death of Ovid in AD 17 (1st century BC, the development of vocabulary, the development of terminology, the elimination of old morphological doublets, the flowering of
literature:
Cicero,
Caesar,
Sallust,
Virgil,
Horace,
Ovid) was particularly distinguished. • During the period of
classical ("silver") Latin dated until the death of emperor
Marcus Aurelius in AD 180, seeing works by
Juvenal,
Tacitus,
Suetonius and the
Satyricon of
Petronius, during which time the phonetic, morphological and spelling norms were finally formed. As the
Roman Republic extended its political dominion over the whole of the Italian peninsula, Latin became dominant over the other Italic languages, which ceased to be spoken perhaps sometime in the 1st century AD. From
Vulgar Latin, the Romance languages emerged. The Latin language gradually spread beyond Rome, along with the growth of the power of this state, displacing, beginning in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, the languages of other Italic tribes, as well as
Illyrian,
Messapian and
Venetic, etc. The
Romanisation of the Italian Peninsula was basically complete by the 1st century BC; except for the
south of Italy and
Sicily, where the dominance of
Greek was preserved. The attribution of
Ligurian is controversial. == Origin theories ==