Aquitanian language

Aquitanian was a language of the Vasconic family, spoken in Roman times across the western and central Pyrenees by the Aquitani north of the mountains and the Vascones to the south, in what is now Navarre, and it is widely regarded as either a direct ancestor of Basque or a very close sister language. No connected Aquitanian text survives; the language is known almost entirely through roughly 200 personal names and 60 names of local deities preserved in Latin inscriptions of the first to third centuries AD, whose word structure and recurring elements closely match those still found in Basque. This onomastic evidence provides the strongest link tying the pre-Roman Basque-speaking region to its modern linguistic descendant, since Basque itself is otherwise the sole surviving branch of a family that once extended more widely across the western Pyrenees. Aquitanian had disappeared by the early Middle Ages, absorbed by Latin and its Romance descendants everywhere except in the Basque-speaking heartland.