Aequian is an
extinct language presumed spoken by the people the Romans termed
Aequi and Aequicoli living in the
Alban hills of northeast
Latium and the central
Apennines east of them during the early and middle
Roman Republic; that is, approximately from the 5th to the 3rd century BC, when they were defeated by the armies of Rome and were subsequently Romanized. As the area was heavily colonized by Latin speakers from Rome, most of the inscriptions from there are in Latin. Two undated inscriptions appear to be in a different dialect, termed Aequian by the scholars with the presumption that in fact they represent the language of the entire pre-Roman tribe. Not enough text survives to deduce any more than that it belonged to the
Italic branch of the
Indo-European language family.