Stazio Attilio, Ceccoli Stefania (eds). I Messapi. Atti del trentesimo Convegno di studi sulla Magna Grecia. Taranto/Lecce, 4-9 ottobre 1990

Taranto: Istituto per la Storia e l’Archeologia della Magna Grecia, 1991 — 701 p.
Мессапский язык относится к индоевропейским языкам. Носители — племена Япигов: Мессапов, Певкетов и Давнов. Был распространён на юго-востоке Апеннинского полуострова на территории современной области Апулии (на юго-восточной оконечности Италии). Известно около 540 надписей VI—I вв. До н. э., выполненных в основном мессапским алфавитом.
As Simona Marchesini has written: “The Messapic language belongs to the Indo-European language family. Since only very fragmented examples from a limited number of text types have been found, only a relatively small range of grammatical and lexical typology and reconstruction has been possible until now. This fact prevents us from assigning the Messapic language to a specific language group within the Indo-European languages. The most relevant gaps concern the verb system and the reconstruction of the labiovelar and palatal consonant sets. The morphology also fails to enlighten us about the affinity of Messapic with the group of Italic languages.”
This big volume (Proceedings of the 30th Conference of studies on Magna Graecia) contains only two contributions specifically devoted to the Messapian language, “La lingua messapica oggi: un bilancio critico” (The Messapian language today: a critical assessment) by Carlo de Simone (later coauthor with Simona Marchesini of Monumenta Linguae Messapicae, 2 volumes published in 2002), pp. 297-322, and “L’onomastica messapica: continuità e innovamento ermeneutico alla luce dei nuovi dati” (The Messapian onomastics: interpretative continuity and innovation in the light of new data) by Uta Friedrike Däuber, a de Simone’s German student, pp. 323-343. Nevertheless, other contributions deal with interesting linguistic data.