Historical linguistshave generally concluded that the ancient Indo-European languages of the Italian peninsula that were not identifiable as belonging to other branches of Indo-European, such as Greek, belonged to a single

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The following classification, proposed by Michiel de Vaan (2008), is generally agreed on, although some scholars have recently rejected the position of Venetic within the Italic branch.

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Proto-Italic period
Proto-Italic was probably originally spoken by Italic tribes north of the Alps. In particular, early contacts

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The main debate concerning the origin of the Italic languages mirrors that on the origins of the Greek ones, except that there is no record of any "early Italic" to play the role of Mycenaean Greek.
All we know about the linguistic landscape of Italy is from inscriptions

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• Italo-Celtic
• Italic peoples
• List of ancient peoples of Italy

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• Baldi, Philip(2017). "The syntax of Italic". In Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias (eds.). Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo

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General and specific characteristics of the pre-Roman Italic languages:
• in phonetics: Oscan (in comparison with Latin and Umbrian) preserved all positions of old diphthongs ai, oi, ei, ou, in the absence of rhotacism, the absence of sibilants,

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