OSCAN LANGUAGE

one of the Italic languages closely related to Umbrian and Volscian and more distantly related to Latin and Faliscan. Spoken in southern and central Italy, it was probably the native tongue of the Samnite people of the central mountainous region of southern Italy. Oscan was gradually displaced by Latin and apparently became completely extinct by the end of the 1st century AD. Modern knowledge of Oscan comes from some 250 documents and inscriptions written in several alphabets: a rustic or colonial Latin alphabet, the Greek alphabet, and a native alphabet derived from Etruscan. Although similar to Latin, Oscan shows a series of different sound shifts (Oscan aasa: Latin ara altar; Oscan pid: Latin quid what), and a divergent vocabulary.