The Ligurian language was an ancient tongue spoken by the Ligures, an indigenous people inhabiting regions of northwestern Italy and southeastern France during pre-Roman and Roman times.

[2][note 1] However, this hypothesis is primarily based on toponymy and onomastics, and on a few glosses given by ancient Graeco-Roman writers (since no Ligurian texts have survived), and thus remains partly speculative due to the scarcity of data.

[6][7] In these sources, Ligustica, the land of the Ligues, often aligned with Massalia's sphere of influence, stretching from Emporion in Catalonia to Antipolis (Antibes) in southeastern France.

Later Latin authors continued to echo elements of the older, semi-mythical tradition, yet the idea of Ligures as a general label for the distant West gradually gave way to a more localised concept, placing them in a specific region around Massalia (Marseille).

This suggests that the Romans recognised a distinct people called 'Ligures' in the Italian Peninsula, separate from the older Greek tradition of 'Ligues' in southern Gaul.

[9] At that point, the Ligures occupied the westernmost part of the Italian peninsula and a portion of the nearby French coastline, extending from Album Intimilium (modern Ventimiglia) to Ameglia.

[10] Early Greek authors such as Hecataeus of Miletus and Pseudo-Scylax probably used 'Ligure' a generic name for such distant and partially known tribes, or merely as a geographic reference that had no relevance to their ethnicity.

Latin historian Livy believed that the Ligures represented an older stratum predating the Gauls in northern Italy, while Strabo and others observed that many of the peoples previously described as 'Ligures' were actually Celts.

Writing in the early 1st century AD, Strabo noted that the Ligures living in the Alps were a people distinct from the Celts, even though they shared cultural similarities:As for the Alps ... many tribes (éthnê) occupy these mountains, all Celtic (keltikà) except the Ligurians; but while these Ligurians belong to a different people (heteroethneis), still they are similar to the Celts in their modes of life (bíois)Regarding the tribes around Massalia, earlier writers called the Salyes 'Ligure', while Strabo used the denomination 'Celto-Ligure'.

Pliny the Elder mentions langa or langurus as a type of lizard inhabiting the banks of the Po River, which Johannes Hubschmid linked to the Latin longus ('long').

[3][4] Javier de Hoz has proposed distinguishing between the region inhabited by the 'Ligures' of the Roman regio Liguria (between Ventimiglia and Ameglia), and the area mentioned in early ancient sources as home to the 'Ligues' (from the Arno River to west of the Rhône, and possibly even as far as northeastern Spain).

[19] Linguists Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel and Xavier Delamarre have argued that many names of tribes described by ancient scholars as 'Ligurian' can be explained as Celtic.

[21] According to de Bernardo Stempel, such linguistically Celtic tribal names suggest that a 'Celto-Ligurian' dialect played an important role among the languages spoken in ancient Ligury.

[22] Furthermore, she notes that some lexical items appear to be common to Ligurian and Celtic, such as cotto- (Alpes Cottiae), gando- (Gandovera), ambi- (pago Ambitrebio), ebu- (Eburelia), medu- (Medutio), seg- (Segesta Tigulliorum), catu- (Catucianum), and roud- (Roudelium).

[26] Similarly, the Ligurian Bodincos ('of unmeasured depth'), from PIE *bʰudʰnós, does not display the metathesis of Italo-Celtic *bʰundʰós (Latin fundus, Gaulish *bunda).

In the late 19th century, Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville proposed that the Ligures constituted an early Indo-European substratum in Western Europe, separate from both Gaulish and Italic groups.

Consequently, many difficult place-name etymologies were attributed to a hypothetical Illyrian layer, leading to broad, stratigraphical theories that traced Indo-European linguistic influences from Gaul all the way to the Balkans.

Though Krahe proposed a more systematic argument than the earlier "Illyrian" or "Celto-Ligurian" frameworks, his theory still faced criticism for assuming that widespread, older Indo-European features belonged to one single language rather than several archaic dialects.