Etruscan

Etruscan may refer to:

Etruscan civilization

Biological taxa

Companies or institutions

Creative works

See also

Etruscan language

The Etruscan language (/ᵻˈtrʌskən/) was the spoken and written language of the Etruscan civilization, in Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria (modern Tuscany plus western Umbria and northern Latium) and in parts of Campania, Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna (where the Etruscans were displaced by Gauls). Etruscan influenced Latin, but was eventually completely superseded by it. The Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions which have been found so far, only a handful of which are of significant length, some bilingual inscriptions with texts also in Latin, Greek or Phoenician, and a few dozen loanwords, such as the name Roma (from Etruscan Ruma), but Etruscan's influence was significant.

Attested from 700 BC to AD 50, the language is not related to any living language, and has historically been referred to as an isolate, but some scholars now hold that it is one of the hypothetical Tyrsenian languages, along with the Raetic language of the Alps and the Lemnian language of the Aegean island of Lemnos. Lacking large corpora or extended texts, more distant relations of that family are unclear. A connection to the Anatolian languages, or at a further remove to Proto-Indo-European, has been suggested, while Russian scholars such as Sergei Starostin have suggested a link to the speculative Dené–Caucasian macrophylum. Neither of these two hypotheses has widespread support.