Italic languages subclass of Indo-European
History of the concept
Historical linguists have generally concluded that the ancient Indo-European languages of the Italian peninsula that were not identifiable as belonging to other branches of Indo-European, such as Greek, belonged to a single branch of the family, parallel for example to Celtic and Germanic. The founder of this theory is Antoine Meillet (1866–1936).This unitary theory has been criticized by, among others, Alois Walde, Vittore Pisani and Giacomo Devoto, who proposed that the Latino-Faliscan and Osco-Umbrian languages constituted two distinct branches of Indo-European. This view gained acceptance in the second half of the 20th century, though proponents such as Rix would later reject the idea, and the unitary theory remains dominant in contemporary scholarship.
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