Italic language formerly spoken in southern and central Italy, related closely to Umbrian and more distantly to Latin .
It was probably the native tongue of the Samnite people of Italy's central mountainous region. Oscan was gradually displaced by Latin and apparently became extinct by the end of the 1st century AD. Modern knowledge of it comes from some 250 inscriptions written in a colonial Latin alphabet , the Greek alphabet , and an alphabet derived from that used for Etruscan .