OVERVIEW

Welcome to your Oscan learning journey! Before you get started, we want to provide you with a background of what Oscan is linguistically.

Oscan is part of the Indo-European language family, a language family that spreads over most of Europe all the way to India and west Asia. Many of the languages that you may know such as English, Spanish, Latin, and even Sanskrit are part of this family. As a member of this family, Oscan may look similar to these languages, as some prefixes, suffixes, and endings are common.

Oscan is also an Italic language and part of the Sabellic language group. The Sabellic languages are a group of languages used by ancient Italian groups such as the Samnites, Marsians, Volscians, and more. These groups were Rome’s rivals and neighbors for centuries before their conquest and had flourishing civilizations of their own. The most prominent languages in the Sabellic group are Oscan and Umbrian, both of which we have knowledge of from inscriptions and other remnants of ancient writing.

Oscan itself was a very common language for centuries in central Italy, up to the 1st century. Many of the towns and cities that dotted central Italy and Campania used Oscan as an official language before Latin took hold. We have tablets in Oscan that describe treaties, funerals, agreements, and more.

However, with the Roman conquest of Italy in the late-centuries BCE, Latin began to replace Oscan as the most prevalent language in central Italy and eventually, replaced it entirely. Thus, Oscan went extinct, although we do have comprehensive knowledge of the language unlike some other ancient languages such as Etruscan

With knowledge of Oscan, we hope that you’ll be able to deciper inscriptions and ancient writing that allow us to peer into the ancient world, exploring their customs, times, and so much more.

Sources: Carl Darling Buck’s A Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian