10 Facts About Italic languages

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 diversified into the Romance languages, which are the only Italic languages natively spoken today, while Literary Latin survived.

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.

All Italic languages are generally written in Old Italic scripts, which descend from the alphabet used to write the non-Italic Etruscan language, and ultimately from the Greek alphabet.

Proto-Italic languages was probably originally spoken by Italic languages tribes north of the Alps.

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Inscriptions show that, by 700 BC, many Italic languages were spoken in the region, including members of several branches of Indo-European and several non-Indo-European Italic languages.

The question of whether Italic languages originated outside Italy or developed by assimilation of Indo-European and other elements within Italy, approximately on or within its current range there, remains.

In phonology, the Italic languages are centum languages by merging the palatals with the velars but keeping the combined group separate from the labio-velars.

In morphology, the Italic languages preserve six cases in the noun and the adjective with traces of a seventh, but the dual of both the noun and the verb has completely disappeared.

Similar to Celtic languages, the Italic languages are divided into P- and Q-branches, depending on the reflex of Proto-Indo-European *k?.