Oscan is a language of the italic branch of Indo-European languages. It was spoken in pre-Roman Italy. The texts are preserved in forms of dedications, curse tablets, legal texts (most extensive corpus), funerary texts, graffiti, coin legends and official inscriptions. The preserved data span from the end of the 6th century BC to the 1st century AD; most of the texts date from 300-89 BC. The corpus comprises about 650 texts (Rix 2002:6). The longest inscription is a bronze tablet called Tabula Bantina from 100 BC.

The Oscan corpus is limited by genre and quantity. Use of adjective valence was inevitable but is so far attested only by a single example of an adjective governing a substantive in the enitive case.

Oscan is an inflectional, fusional language with a SVO word order. The adjectives, as well as substantives, inflected for case, number (singular, plural) and gender (masculine, feminine, neuter). Oscan had seven cases – nominative, vocative, accusative, dative, ablative,genitive, locative. In plural, dative, ablative and locative merged in a single case and the nominative was also used for vocative.
In grammars, Oscan adjectives are organized to classes based on stems (as well as substantives). The comparative and superlative were formed by the means of suffixation.

The adpositions functioned both as prepositions and postpositions. They generally governed a single case – the accusative, ablative or locative.
Among the non-finite verbal forms were the present and past participle, present and perfect infinitive, supine and a gerundive.

Bibliography:

Crawford, Michael. 2011. Imagines Italicae.  A Corpus of Italic Inscriptions. London: Institute of Classical Studies – School of Advanced Study.

McDonald, Katherine. 2015. Oscan in Southern Italy and Sicily. Evaluating Langugae Contact in a Fragmentary Corpus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rix, Helmut. 2002. Sabellische Texte. Die Texte des Oskischen, Umbrischen und Südpikenischen. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter.

Wallace, Rex. 2007. The Sabellic Languages of Ancient Italy. Muenchen: LINCOM Europa.