Venetic is an Indo-European language, belonging to the Italic branch and closely related to Latin, attested by approximately 500 inscriptions. The inscriptions mostly come from northeastern Italy and date from the 6 th century BC to the 1 st century BC.

Venetic is almost exclusively written in local varieties of an epichoric alphabet, which are to be regarded as elaborations based on Etruscan models.

The Venetic corpus contains short and repetitive inscriptions – with some notable exceptions –, mainly pertaining to funerary and votive contexts, although there are also examples of other textual typologies, such as public and boundary inscriptions.