Local Languages in Italy and the West

In: Bruun C., Edmondson J. (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy. — Oxford University Press, 2014. — pp. 699-720.For most languages, epigraphy provides the only concrete evidence that they ever existed, since the advent of Latin and Roman expansion led to the widespread extinction of all previous spoken varieties. Most of the modern languages spoken in the area of the western Roman Empire either derive from Latin (such as Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese) or from the languages of later migrants into these areas (including Arabic in North Africa and English in Great Britain). Only a handful of languages that were spoken before the Romans have survived, and these on the fringes of the Empire or in inaccessible regions: Albanian, Basque, Berber, Celtic varieties including Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. None of these languages is attested in the epigraphic record in the classical period (except perhaps Berber and British Celtic). Doubtless there were other varieties spoken that remained unrecorded and are now lost; the language map of the classical world will always contain question marks and blank space. Although it is incomplete, the epigraphic record does, however, provide evidence for a wide diversity of languages both before and during Roman expansion in the West.