Lombardic or Langobardic German : Langobardisch is an extinct West Germanic language that was spoken by the Lombards Langobardi , the Germanic people who settled in present-day Italy in the sixth century and established the Kingdom of the Lombards.
It was already declining by the seventh century because the invaders quickly adopted the Vulgar Latin spoken by the local population. As a result, there are many aspects of the language about which nothing is known.
Lombardic is classified as part of the Upper German group of West Germanic languages, descended from Elbe Germanic , and most closely related to its geographical neighbours Alemannic and Bavarian. This is consistent with the accounts of classical historians, and indeed with the archaeological evidence of Langobardic settlement along the river Elbe. In view of the lack of Lombardic texts and the narrow scope of the attested Lombardic vocabulary — almost entirely nouns in the nominative case and proper names — the classification rests entirely on phonology.
The main evidence for Lombardic comes from contemporary documents written in Latin, where a individual Lombardic terms are cited and b people with Lombardic names are mentioned. There are also a small number of inscriptions, a handful of which use the Runic alphabet. Additional information about the vocabulary of Lombardic comes from later-attested loan words into Italian and its dialects, as well as a large number of Italian place names of Lombardic origin see below.
The documentary sources fall into three categories: [ 7 ]. Establishing sound values for Lombardic is problematic for two reasons. Where words are attested in contemporary Lombardic documents, scribes trained in Latin could not be expected to record accurately, or even consistently, the sounds of Lombardic.
