page_title: History of Latin
section_title: Old Latin
hierarchical_section_title: History of Latin / Old Latin
context_page_description: Latin is a member of the broad family of Italic languages. Its alphabet, the Latin alphabet, emerged from the Old Italic alphabets, which in turn were derived from the Greek and Phoenician scripts. Historical Latin came from the prehistoric language of the Latium region, specifically around the River Tiber, where Roman civilization first developed. How and when Latin came to be spoken by the Romans are questions that have long been debated. Various influences on Latin of Celtic dialects in northern Italy, the non-Indo-European Etruscan language in Central Italy, and the Greek of southern Italy have been detected, but when these influences entered the native Latin is not known for certain.
  Surviving Latin literature consists almost entirely of Classical Latin in its broadest definition. It includes a polished and sometimes highly stylized literary language sometimes termed Golden Latin, which spans the 1st century BC and the early years of the 1st century AD. However, throughout the history of ancient Rome the spoken language differed in both grammar and vocabulary from that of literature, and is referred to as Vulgar Latin.
context_section_description: Old Latin (also called Early Latin or Archaic Latin) refers to the period of Latin texts before the age of Classical Latin, extending from textual fragments that probably originated in the Roman monarchy to the written language of the late Roman republic about 75 BC. Almost all the writing of its earlier phases is inscriptional.
  Some phonological characteristics of older Latin are the case endings -os and -om (later Latin -us and -um).  In many locations, classical Latin turned intervocalic /s/ into /r/.  This had implications for declension: early classical Latin, honos, honosis; Classical honor, honoris ("honor").  Some  Latin texts preserve /s/ in this position, such as the Carmen Arvale's lases for lares.
caption: The Duenos inscription, from the 6th century BC, is the second-earliest known Latin text.
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