Attestations of Gaulish proper in present-day France are known as "Transalpine Gaulish".It has been described as either an "early dialect of an outlying form of Gaulish" or a separate Continental Celtic language. Lepontic, attested from a small area on the southern slopes of the Alps, around the present-day Swiss town of Lugano, is the oldest Celtic language known to have been written, with inscriptions in a variant of the Old Italic script appearing circa 600 BC.Among those regions where substantial inscriptional evidence exists, three varieties are usually distinguished. The Gaulish varieties of central and eastern Europe and of Anatolia (known as Noric and Galatian, respectively) are barely attested, but from what little is known of them it appears that they were still quite similar to those of Gaul and can be considered dialects of a single language. Their precise linguistic relationships are uncertain because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence. As a result of the expansion of Celtic tribes during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, closely related varieties of Celtic came to be spoken in a vast arc extending from present-day Britain and France through the Alpine region and Pannonia in central Europe, and into parts of the Balkans and Anatolia. It is estimated that during the Bronze Age, Proto-Celtic started fragmenting into distinct languages, including Celtiberian and Gaulish. It is thought to have gone extinct some time around the late 6th century. Gaulish in Western Europe was supplanted by Vulgar Latin and various Germanic languages from around the 5th century AD onwards. During his conquest of Gaul, Caesar reported that the Helvetii were in possession of documents in the Greek script, and all Gaulish coins used the Greek script until about 50 BC.
After the Roman conquest of those regions, writing shifted to the use of the Latin alphabet. Gaulish texts were first written in the Greek alphabet in southern France and in a variety of the Old Italic script in northern Italy. Gaulish is found in some 800 (often fragmentary) inscriptions including calendars, pottery accounts, funeral monuments, short dedications to gods, coin inscriptions, statements of ownership, and other texts, possibly curse tablets. The precise linguistic relationships among them, as well as between them and the modern Insular Celtic languages, are uncertain and a matter of ongoing debate because of their sparse attestation. Together with Lepontic and the Celtiberian language spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, Gaulish helps form the geographic group of Continental Celtic languages. The more divergent Lepontic of Northern Italy has also sometimes been subsumed under Gaulish. In a wider sense, it also comprises varieties of Celtic that were spoken across much of central Europe (" Noric"), parts of the Balkans, and Anatolia (" Galatian"), which are thought to have been closely related. In the narrow sense, Gaulish was the language spoken by the Celtic inhabitants of Gaul (modern-day France, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Switzerland, Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the west bank of the Rhine). Gaulish was an ancient Celtic language that was spoken in parts of Continental Europe before and during the period of the Roman Empire. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols.