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The Italic subfamily is a member of the Centum branch of the Indo-European language group. Italic has two branches:
- Sabellic including:
- Oscan, spoken in the south-central region of the Italian peninsula
- Umbrian (not to be confused with the modern Umbrian dialect of Italian), spoken in the north-central region
- Latino-Faliscan including:
- Faliscan - spoken in the area around Falerii Veteres (modern Civita Castellana) north of the city of Rome
- Latin, originally spoken in west-central Italy - (SIL Code, LTN; ISO 639-1 code, la; ISO 639-2 code, lat)
The Italic languages are first attested in writing from Latin inscriptions dating to the 6th or 5th centuries BCE. The alphabets used are based on the Etruscan alphabet, which is itself based on the Greek alphabet. The Italic languages themselves show minor influence from the Etruscan and ancient Greek languages. As Rome extended its political dominion over the whole of the Italian peninsula, so too did Latin become dominant over the other Italic languages, which ceased to be spoken perhaps sometime in the 1st century CE. From so-called Vulgar Latin the Romance languagesThe Romance languages also called Romanic languages are a subfamily of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken by the common people evolving in different areas after the break-up of the Roman Empire. Latin it emerged.
See also
- Language families and languagesLanguages Most languages are known to belong to language families ("families" hereforth). An accurately identified family is a phylogenetic unit, i. all its members derive from a common ancestor. The ancestor is very seldom known to us directly, since mos
*The Italic subfamily is a member of the Centum branch of the Indo-European language group. Italic has two branches: Sabellic including: Oscan, spoken in the south-central region of the Italian peninsula Umbrian (not to be confused with the modern Umbrian
