Ligurian (ancient language)

Ligurian was an ancient Indo-European language spoken by the Ligures, an indigenous people of northwestern Italy and southeastern France in pre-Roman and Roman times. No continuous text survives, and the language is known almost entirely through place names, river names, tribal and personal names, and a handful of glosses quoted by Greek and Latin authors, the most significant being the Polcevera Tablet of 117 BCE, a Roman arbitration record preserving indigenous place names. Because the evidence is so fragmentary, its classification has long been debated, and scholars remain divided over whether it represents an archaic form of Celtic or a distinct Indo-European branch of its own.