The Oscan Alphabet

The Oscan alphabet has 21 letters. í and ú, the last two in the chart below and variants of the regular i and u, were developed later to represent e and o as vowels. Thus, Oscan has six vowels. The letter o itself is absent from Oscan. Meanwhile, z is a ts sound. Double vowels are also common in Oscan to show the length of the vowel.

In many instances, Oscan was written boustrophedon, i.e. right to left instead of left to right.

Some Oscan inscriptions were written with the Latin alphabet, and in Southern Italy, Oscan inscriptions written with the Greek alphabet are common, showing the bilingualism of the area.