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, whose conquest of the other Italic peoples led those languages to become 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 also survived alongside them.
Facts
Disputed
Proto-Language StatusWhether a single Proto-Italic language existed is disputed. The unitary theory, tracing Latin and the other ancient Italic languages to one common ancestor, remains dominant in current scholarship, but some linguists, including Silvestri and Rix, have argued that no single consistent Proto-Italic phonology and morphology can be reconstructed, proposing instead that the ancestors of the ancient Italic languages were two or more separately descended Indo-European languages. 1 Rix later changed his mind and became a supporter of Italic as a unified family, per the same article. RegionThe Italian Peninsula, where its earliest attested members were spoken in the first millennium BC; its only surviving branch, Romance, is now spoken worldwide. 1 Speaker Count Connections
Ancestor Of
The Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin, the spoken register of the Italic branch's Latino-Faliscan language.
Descends From
Italic is a primary branch of Indo-European, ancestral to Latin and the modern Romance languages.
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Italic Languages
Wikimedia Foundationlead paragraph, first sentence
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.
lead section, speaker-count sentence
With over 900 million native speakers, the Romance languages make Italic the second-most-widely spoken branch of the Indo-European family, after Indo-Iranian at 1.7 billion native speakers.
Origin theories section
Some linguists, like Silvestri and Rix, further argue that no common Proto-Italic can be reconstructed such that its phonological system may have developed into those of Latin and Osco-Umbrian through consistent phonetic changes and that its phonology and morphology can be consistently derived from those of Proto-Indo-European.
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