The existence, in pre-Roman Italy, of populations which were clearly different both ethnically and culturally – as described by ancient chroniclers – is visible both in the physical traces they left and in the extraordinary richness of the so-called Italic and non-Indo-European languages spoken in the peninsula. A few examples of this extraordinary mosaic are the Iguvine Tablets in Umbrian, the Cortona Tablet and the Liver of Piacenza in Etruscan, the Cista Ficoroni, in archaic Latin, the stele in Oscan from Capua and the Este Tablet in Venetic.
These languages differed in words, grammar and syntax, even in their alphabets, could belong to common linguistic families or be profoundly distinct. For centuries they identified the populations Rome came up against during the stages of its expansion. Their progressive dwindling as Latin became more dominant is perhaps one of the most tangible signs of the Romanization and unification of Italy, a process which was also cultural. At the same time, the survival of texts written in indigenous languages in cities which were already officially within the state organization of Rome – or in Greek among the ancient colonies of the south of the peninsula, long after their definitive assimilation – bears witness to a familiar resilience of the spoken and distinctive vernacular of individual communities against the official language.
Surviving inscriptions and historical linguistics studies currently enable us to decipher – at least in part – Etruscan, Latin-Faliscan, Oscan-Umbrian, the various Celtic languages, those of the Ligurian and Po Valley area, of the Southern Adriatic, or that of Sicily. Linguistics studies also reveal the by no means marginal influences of the pre-Roman linguistic substrata – attributable to the numerous populations of ancient Italy – which survive in Classical Latin and even in modern languages derived from Latin.