Venetic

Venetic refers to things associated with the Veneti, an ancient people who inhabited the northeastern Italian coast and the Po valley in the area of what is now the Veneto region and parts of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The Veneti are known from historical and archaeological sources as maritime traders and settlers who interacted with neighboring peoples in pre-Roman Italy.

The Venetic language is an extinct Indo-European tongue known from inscriptions found mainly in the Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia regions, dating roughly from the 6th to the 1st centuries BCE. The corpus is relatively small and comprises personal names, votive dedications, and short inscriptions. The Venetic script is derived from an alphabet related to the broader Italic-Etruscan script tradition. Its precise classification within Indo-European is debated, but most scholars treat Venetic as a distinct branch closely related to Italic languages; it is not mutually intelligible with Latin or other surviving Italic tongues.

In modern scholarship, Venetic denotes both the linguistic and archaeological record of the Veneti and their territory. The term is also used more broadly as an adjective linking material culture, inscriptions, and historical studies to the Veneto region and its ancient heritage. It should not be confused with the modern Venetian language or dialects spoken in Venice today, which are part of the Romance linguistic family and distinct from the ancient Venetic language.