They were spoken by the Latino-Faliscan people of Italy who lived there from the early 1st millennium BCE.

As the power of Ancient Rome grew, Latin absorbed elements of the other languages and replaced Faliscan.

Latin in turn developed via Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages, now spoken by more than 800 million people, largely as a result of the influence of the Roman Empire initially, and in later times the Spanish, French and Portuguese Empires.

They retain the Indo-European labiovelars /*kʷ, *gʷ/ as qu-, gu- (later becoming velar and semivocal), whereas in Osco-Umbrian they become labial p, b. Latin and Faliscan use the ablative suffix -d, seen in med ("me", ablative), which is absent in Osco-Umbrian.

For reasons of symmetry, it is quite possible that many sequences of gu in archaic Latin in fact represent a voiced labiovelar /gʷ/.