In northern Italy and the adjacent Alpine region between the late 7th and the 1st century BC, a number of local languages were written with alphabet variants which had been derived from the Etruscan alphabet of central Italy. The documents are exclusively inscriptions on objects such as gravestones or ceramics, usually short and containing mainly the personal names of deceased persons, owners, and dedicators. Some of these inscriptions – about 450 documents from the western area, mainly Lombardia, Piemonte and Ticino, which are written in the so-called alphabet of Lugano – preserve texts and names which are linguistically Celtic, i.e. they belong to a language group which is also known from ancient Gaul as well as other parts of Europe in antiquity, and lives on today in languages such as Irish and Welsh on the British Isles. The presence of speakers of a Celtic language in northern Italy – a "Cisalpine Celtic" – before the area was conquered by Rome is not surprising, as many Roman historiographers such as Pliny and Livy report that, starting around 400 BC, Gaulish tribes from beyond the Alps moved to and settled in the Padan plain. This tradition is supported by modern archaeological research, which shows that many settlements around this time were destroyed and resettled by bearers of the La Tène culture of continental Europe. A considerable number Cisalpine Celtic inscriptions, however, can be dated archaeologically – i.e. through the objects on which they are written – to the 5th, 6th and even 7th century BC, viz. before the time when the Gauls are supposed to have arived in Italy. There is debate among scholars about how these inscriptions should be explained – are they evidence for immigration movements from Gaul a few centuries before those remembered by the Romans, or do they indicate that an indigenous Celtic-speaking population was already present in the area long before these historical events? In the first case, the language of the older inscriptions would also be Gaulish, while in the second case it would be a separate variety of Celtic, which is traditionally referred to as Lepontic. While archaeological and historical considerations tend to support the second theory, it has proved difficult to show that there is any significant difference between the putative Lepontic, and the Gaulish language which is attested in at least some of the later inscriptions. As a consequence, it is difficult to determine the extent of the linguistic difference between Lepontic and Gaulish, and to decide which inscriptions after 400 BC – all written with the alphabet of Lugano – belong to which of the two linguistic strata. Our inability to distinguish between Lepontic and Cisalpine Gaulish obscures important aspects of linguistic, cultural, economic and settlement history, and the relations and interactions between the Celtic-speaking groups of Northern Italy and their respective identities.
