Ligurian language (ancient)

The Ligurian language was an ancient tongue spoken by the Ligures, an indigenous people inhabiting regions of northwestern Italy and southeastern France during pre-Roman and Roman times. Because Ligurian is so sparsely attested, its classification and relationship to neighbouring languages has proven difficult, prompting debate among linguists for much of the 20th century.

The current scholarly consensus is that Ligurian was likely an Indo-European language or language family, possibly Celtic, or at least influenced by or related to Celtic languages. However, this hypothesis is primarily based on toponymy and onomastics, and on a few glosses given by ancient Graeco-Roman writers (since no Ligurian texts have survived), and thus remains partly speculative due to the scarcity of data. Because of that, some scholars have even cast doubt on the existence of a Ligurian language itself, since it can remain problematic to postulate that all the non-Celtic and non-Italic forms found across the regions described as "Ligurian" by ancient sources come from a single language instead of several ancient dialects.

Influenced by the work of Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville, some 20th-century scholars have attempted to identify Ligurian as a remnant of a Pre-Indo-European or Indo-European substratum. These theories, particularly those attempting to establish additional connections with data from other European regions, have faced increasing criticism in recent scholarship.