Raetic is an obscure language of antiquity, which used to be spoken in the province of Raetia, in the eastern Alps, to the north and west of Venetic. It is very sparsely attested, leaving room for much speculation on its ancestry, but an affiliation with Etruscan seems most probable. The Roman Empire ca. ... The Alps is the collective name for one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east, through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west. ... Venetic is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken in ancient times in the Veneto region of Italy, between the Po River delta and the southern fringe of the Alps. ... Etruscan was a language spoken and written in the ancient region of Etruria (current Tuscany) and in what is now Lombardy (where the Etruscans were displaced by Gauls), in Italy. ...
The language continued to be used in a religious context until late antiquity; the final record of such use relates to the invasion of Rome by Alaric, chief of the Visigoths, in 410 CE,(1) when Etruscan priests were summoned to conjure lightning against the barbarians.
The apparent isolation of the Etruscanlanguage had already been noted by the ancients; it is confirmed by repeated and vain attempts of some to assign it to one of the various linguistic groups or types of the Mediterranean and Eurasian world.
However, there are in fact connections with Indo-European languages, particularly with the Italic languages, and also with more or less known non-Indo-European languages of western Asia and the Caucasus, the Aegean, Italy, and the Alpine zone as well as with the relics of the Mediterranean linguistic substrata revealed by place-names.
The Etruscanlanguage was spoken by the Etruscans in Etruria (Tuscany and Umbria) until about the 1st century CE.
Used in religious ceremonies until the early 5th century, Etruscan is related to Raetic and also to Lemnian.
The Etruscan alphabet was diffused at the end of the Archaic period, around 500 CE, into Camunic, a language once spoken in the northwest of Italy, and became the model for the alphabets of the Alpine populations.
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