ABSTRACT
As a linguistic term, “Italic” refers most commonly to a group of closely related IndoEuropean languages spoken throughout the Italian peninsula in the 1st millennium BCE (Map 6.1). The major language in this group, that is to say, the one for which there is a significant documentary corpus, is Latin. It is also the only Italic language – in fact the only language of ancient Italy, apart from Greek – that did not become extinct. The Romance languages, spoken today throughout Western Europe and the Americas, are its modern descendants.
