Rhaetic language

Rhaetic is an extinct, non-Indo-European language of the Tyrsenian family, spoken in the eastern Alps in the historical region of Rhaetia during the pre-Roman and early Roman periods. It is documented in roughly 280 short inscriptions dated from the sixth to the first century BC, found across a broad Alpine area spanning northern Italy, southern Germany, eastern Switzerland, Slovenia and western Austria, written in two regional variants of the Etruscan alphabet known as the Sanzeno and Magre scripts. Linguists classify Rhaetic alongside Etruscan and Lemnian in the Tyrsenian family on the strength of shared grammatical and lexical features, though modern scholarship has abandoned the ancient claim that the Rhaetians were literally Etruscan migrants, viewing them instead as an indigenous Alpine population whose language happened to be a genuine linguistic relative of Etruscan. The language died out as its speakers were absorbed into the Roman world and shifted to Latin.