What language was spoken by the Roman Empire?
Ancient Rome
The native language of the Romans was Latin, an Italic language the grammar of which relies little on word order, conveying meaning through a system of affixes attached to word stems. Its alphabet was based on the Etruscan alphabet, which was in turn based on the Greek alphabet. Although surviving Latin literature consists almost entirely of Classical Latin, an artificial and highly stylized and polished literary language from the 1st century BC, the spoken language of the Roman Empire was Vulgar Latin, which significantly differed from Classical Latin in grammar and vocabulary, and eventually in pronunciation. Speakers of Latin could understand both until the 7th century when spoken Latin began to diverge so much that 'Classical' or 'Good Latin' had to be learned as a second language
Sicilia (Roman province)
With the establishment of six Roman "coloniae" at the beginning of the Imperial period, Sicily received a large influx of Latin speakers for the first time and a Latin-Greek bilingualism developed which continued until the Byzantine period. Generally, in the Imperial period, Latin replaced Greek in an ever-increasing number of areas, while Greek was confined to lower registers, although it retained its historic prestige and was widely used by the population. Latin became firmly established as the elite language, with Calpurnius Siculus, , and Julius Firmicus Maternus producing literary works in Latin, although there are also examples of Sicilian authors who wrote in Greek during the Imperial period, such as Pantaenus, Aristocles of Messene, Probus of Lilybaeum, and Citharius. In this period the non-Greek languages must have definitively disappeared, although Punic may still have been spoken at the end of the Imperial period based on the testimony of Apuleius. Numerous Jewish and Samaritan communities are attested on the island in the Imperial period, although they usually appear in the record using Greek or Latin. From the 5th century the Greek 
language appears to have experienced a recovery that lasted into the period of Muslim domination.
Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Turkish was the official language of the Empire. It was an Oghuz Turkic language highly influenced by Persian and Arabic. The Ottomans had several influential languages: Turkish, spoken by the majority of the people in Anatolia and by the majority of Muslims of the Balkans except in Albania and Bosnia; Persian, only spoken by the educated; Arabic, spoken mainly in Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the Levant and parts of the Horn of Africa and Berber in North Africa. In the last two centuries, usage of these became limited, though, and specific: Persian served mainly as a literary language for the educated, while Arabic was used for Islamic prayers.
Turkish, in its Ottoman variation, was a language of military and administration since the nascent days of the Ottomans. The Ottoman constitution of 1876 did officially cement the official imperial status of Turkish.
Languages of the Roman Empire
In Italy, the written use of Latin had replaced Oscan—like Latin, an Italic language—and Etruscan by the end of the 1st century AD. Oscan graffiti are preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which was in the Oscan region, and a couple may date before or after an earlier regional earthquake in AD 62. In the mid-1st century, the emperor Claudius, who had keen antiquarian interests, knew Etruscan and wrote a multivolume history of the Etruscans, but the work has not survived.
Romanian language
The first written record about a Romance language spoken in the Middle Ages in the Balkans is from 587. A Vlach muleteer accompanying the Byzantine army noticed that the load was falling from one of the animals and shouted to a companion "Torna, torna frate" (meaning "Return, return brother!"), and, "sculca" (out of bed) . Theophanes Confessor recorded it as part of a 6th-century military expedition by Commentiolus and Priscus against the Avars and Slovenes.
Romance languages
Because of the difficulty of imposing boundaries on a continuum, various counts of the modern Romance languages are given; for example, Dalby lists 23 based on mutual intelligibility. The following, more extensive list, includes 35 current, living languages, and one recently extinct language, Dalmatian:Romance languages are the continuation of Vulgar Latin, the popular and colloquial sociolect of Latin spoken by soldiers, settlers, and merchants of the Roman Empire, as distinguished from the classical form of the language spoken by the Roman upper classes, the form in which the language was generally written. Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language in continental Western Europe. Latin also exerted a strong influence in southeastern Britain, the Roman province of Africa, western Germany, Pannonia and the whole Balkans.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Aramaic was the primary language of Syria and Mesopotamia, with several dialects. Syriac was in use around Antioch, one of the three largest cities of the Empire, and particularly by Christians. Syriac literature is known from the latter 2nd century, spreading from the Christian community in Edessa. Early Syriac literature was produced in a largely Greek intellectual milieu until the 4th century, but was distinctive for its use of rich symbolism and emphasis on verse forms, and influenced Greek writers such as Eusebius, Basil and Theodoret. Among the earliest Syriac literature was the "Diatessaron" of Tatian, and translations of sections from the Bible.
Aromanian language
It is generally considered that sometime between 800 and 1,200 years ago, Vulgar Latin spoken in the Balkan provinces of the Roman Empire, which is also known as Proto-Eastern Romance, broke up into four languages: Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian. One possibility for the origin of Aromanian is that in the same way standard Romanian is believed to be descended from the Latin spoken by the Getae (Dacians ["Daco-Thracians"] and Roman settlers in what is now Romania), Aromanian descended from the Latin spoken by Thracian and Illyrian peoples living in the southern Balkans (Epirus, Macedonia and Thrace).
Languages of the Roman Empire
Christians in late antiquity might insert Hebrew into Greek exorcisms. Saint Jerome reports an odd story about a Frankish-Latin bilingual man of the "Candidati" Imperial bodyguard who, in a state of demonic possession, began speaking perfect Aramaic, a language he did not know.
Legacy of the Roman Empire
The Roman line continued uninterrupted to rule the Eastern Roman Empire, whose main characteristics were Roman concept of state, medieval Greek culture and language, and Orthodox Christian faith. The Byzantines themselves never ceased to refer to themselves as "Romans" ("Rhomaioi") and to their state as the "Roman Empire", the "Empire of the Romans" (in Greek Βασιλεία των Ῥωμαίων, Basileía ton Rhōmaíōn) or "Romania" (Ῥωμανία, Rhōmanía). Likewise, they were called "Rûm" (Rome) by their eastern enemies to the point that competing neighbours even acquired its name, such as the Sultanate of Rûm.
Latins (Italic tribe)
The oldest extant inscription in the Latin language is believed to be engraved on the "Lapis Niger" ("Black Stone") discovered in 1899 in the Roman Forum, dating from around 600 BC: in the mid-Roman kingdom, according to the traditional Roman chronology, but more likely close to its inception. Written in a primitive form of Archaic Latin, it indicates that the Romans remained Latin-speakers in the period when some historians have suggested that Rome had become "Etruscanised" in both language and culture. It also lends support to the existence of the Kings of Rome in this era, whom some historians regarded as mythical: the inscription contains the word "recei", the word for "king" in the dative singular in archaic Latin - "regi" in classical Latin. However, it has been objected that the word may refer to a religious official, such as the "rex sacrorum", rather than the political king of Rome.
Italic peoples
After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the use of the Latin language retreated in size, but was still widely used, such as through the Catholic Church as well as by others like the Germanic Visigoths and the Catholic Frankish kingdom of Clovis. In part due to regional dialects of the Latin language and local environments, several languages evolved from it, the Romance languages. The ethnic groups that emerged from this development are collectively referred to as Romance peoples or Latin peoples. The Spanish and Portuguese languages prominently spread into North, Central, and South America through colonization. The French language has spread to most inhabited continents through colonialism, however the ethnic qualification of the Italic ethnolinguistic group is only found in France, and some parts of Haiti. The Italian language developed as a national language of Italy beginning in the 19th century out of several similar Romance dialects. The Romanian language has developed primarily in the Daco-Romanian variant that is the national language of Romania and Moldova, but also with other Romanian variants such as the Aromanian spoken in Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia by the Aromanian minority.
Languages of the Roman Empire
The Romans placed a high value on the written word, as indicated by their obsession with documentation and public inscriptions. The Imperial bureaucracy was so dependent on writing that the Babylonian Talmud declared "if all seas were ink, all reeds were pen, all skies parchment, and all men scribes, they would be unable to set down the full scope of the Roman government's concerns." Estimates of the average literacy rate in the Empire range from 5 to 30 percent or higher, depending in part on the definition of "literacy". The lack of state intervention in access to education was a barrier to literacy, since formal education was available only to children from families who could pay for it.
The birth certificates and wills of Roman citizens had to be written in Latin until the time of Alexander Severus (reigned 222–235). Illiterate Roman subjects would have someone such as a government scribe "(scriba)" read or write their official documents for them. Laws and edicts were posted in writing as well as read out. Public art and religious ceremonies were ways to communicate imperial ideology regardless of language spoken or ability to read. An early form of story ballet "(pantomimus)" was brought to Rome by Greek performers and became popular throughout the multilingual Empire in part because it relied on gesture rather than verbal expression.
Roman command structure during First Mithridatic War
Conflict and conquest of the east began in the decade after the First Punic War with the First Illyrian War, 229-228 BC. Illyria was not a unified state. It was rather a region of small independent kingdoms distinguished by language as well as by politics. The major language or language group was spoken by tribes in “Illyria Proper” (Roman term) in the west Balkans, now speaking unrelated Albanian and Slavic languages. No descendant of the Illyrian languages remain. The populations were overrun in the Middle Ages.
World language
The Romance languages bear testimony to the role of Latin as the "lingua franca" of the Roman Empire; for example, Italian has always been important in the Mediterranean region, and nowadays it is the most-spoken language among members of the Roman catholic hierarchy and it is also used in music (especially Opera) and the fashion industry. Turkish was similarly important as the primary language of the Ottoman Empire. Koine Greek was the "world language" of the Hellenistic period, but its distribution is not reflected in the distribution of Modern Greek due to the linguistic impact of the Slavic, Arabic and Turkic expansions. The distribution of the Arabic and Turkic languages, in turn, are a legacy of the Caliphates and the Turkic Khaganate, respectively.
Western world
The dissolution of the Western half (nominally in AD 476, but in truth a long process that ended by AD 800) left only the Eastern Roman Empire alive. The East continued to call themselves Eastern Romans even after AD 610 – 800 when Greek had become official language of the empire (was Latin) and the Pope's crowning of Charlemagne as "Emperor of the Romans", while the West began thinking in terms of Western Latins (those living in the old Western Empire) and Eastern Greeks (those inside the Roman remnant to the east).
Languages of the Roman Empire
The form of private or personalized ritual characterized as "magic" might be conducted in a hodgepodge of languages. Magic, and even some therapies for illnesses, almost always involved incantation or the reciting of spells "(carmina)", often accompanied by the ritualized creation of inscribed tablets "(lamellae)" or amulets. These are known from both archaeological artifacts and written texts such as the Greek Magical Papyri, a collection of spells dating variously from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD. Although Augustus attempted to suppress magic by burning some 2,000 esoteric books early in his reign, magical practices were disseminated widely throughout the Greco-Roman world, and attest to an awareness of multilingualism among the peoples of the Empire. Spells were not translated, because their efficacy was thought to reside in their precise wording; a language such as Gaulish thus may have persisted for private ritual purposes when it no longer had everyday currency.
The Greek Magical Papyri "(PGM)" reflect Greco-Egyptian syncretism, incorporating not only Egyptian and Hellenistic religion, but Near Eastern elements, including Jewish magic and dashes of Christian magic. Egyptian and Greek deities, the God of the Jews and Judaic angels, and Jesus are named. The "PGM" are written primarily in Greek with substantial passages in Demotic Egyptian and inserted strings of syllables that are "pronounceable, though unintelligible". These "voces magicae" ("magic words") occur throughout magic texts and inscriptions, and often suggest corrupt Coptic or Egyptian, Hebrew, Aramaic or other Semitic languages, and Celtic. Hebrew and Greek appear in Demotic magical texts; Coptic magic incorporates Hebrew; Egyptian pops up in Latin spells. While many "voces magicae" may be deliberate neologisms or obscurantism, scholars have theorized that the more recognizable passages may be the products of garbled or misunderstood transmission, either in copying a source text or transcribing oral material.
List of lingua francas
During the time of the Hellenistic civilization and Roman Empire, the lingua francas were Koine Greek and Latin. During the Middle Ages, the lingua franca was Greek in the parts of Europe, Middle East and Northern Africa where the Byzantine Empire held hegemony, and Latin was primarily used in the rest of Europe. Latin, for a significant portion of the expansion of the Roman Catholic Church, was the universal language of prayer and worship. During the Second Vatican Council, Catholic liturgy changed to local languages, although Latin remains the official language of the Vatican. Latin was used as the language of scholars in Europe until the early 19th century in most subjects. For instance, Christopher Simpson's "Chelys or The Division viol" on how to improvise on the viol (viola da gamba) was published in 1665 in a multilingual edition in Latin and English, to make the material accessible for the wider European music community. Another example is the Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg, who published his book "Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum" in 1741 about an ideal society "Potu" ("Utop" backwards) with equality between the genders and an egalitarian structure, in Latin in Germany to avoid Danish censorship and to reach a greater audience. Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published in Latin in 1687: the first English translation did not appear until 1729. In subjects like medicine and theology Latin has been a subject of study until the present day in most European universities, despite declining use in recent years.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Punic was spoken at the highest level of society: the emperor Septimius Severus (reigned 193–211) was born in Leptis Magna and spoke Punic as well as Latin and Greek, while his sister supposedly had little command of Latin at all. Augustine, who was from North Africa, several times mentions Punic; he observed that it was related to Hebrew and Syriac, and his knowledge of Punic helped him figure out transliterated Semitic words from the Bible.
Byzantine Empire
The emperor Diocletian (reigned 284–305) sought to renew the authority of Latin, making it the official language of the Roman administration also in the East, and the Greek expression ἡ κρατοῦσα διάλεκτος "(hē kratousa dialektos)" attests to the status of Latin as "the language of power." The scholar Libanius (4th century) regarded Latin as causing a decline in the quality of Greek rhetoric as the study of Latin became necessary for those who wanted to occupy public offices. In the early 5th century, Greek gained equal status with Latin as official language in the East and emperors gradually began to legislate in Greek rather than Latin starting with the reign of Leo I the Thracian in the 460s. The last Eastern emperor to stress the importance of Latin was Justinian I (reigned AD 527–565), whose Corpus Juris Civilis was written almost entirely in Latin. He may also have been the last native Latin-speaking emperor.
Vestinian language
Vestinian is an extinct Indo-European language documented only in two surviving inscriptions of the Roman Republic. It is presumed to have been anciently spoken by the tribe of the Vestini, who occupied the region within current Abruzzo from Gran Sasso to the Adriatic Sea in east-central Italy during that time. Vestini is the Roman exonym for the people. Not enough of their presumed language survives to classify it beyond Italic. Vestinian is one of a number of scantily attested Italic languages spoken in small regions of the Apennines directly east of Rome called generally "the minor dialects." There is currently no agreement on their precise classification.
Romance languages
To some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire (from the end of the first century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. Both were mutually intelligible as one and the same language, which was true until very approximately the second half of the 7th century. However, within two hundred years Latin became a dead language since "the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them," i.e. Latin had ceased to be a first language and became a foreign language that had to be learned, if the label Latin is constrained to refer to a state of the language frozen in past time and restricted to linguistic features for the most part typical of higher registers.
Roman Empire
Among other reforms, the emperor Diocletian (reigned 284–305) sought to renew the authority of Latin, and the Greek expression "hē kratousa dialektos" attests to the continuing status of Latin as "the language of power." In the early 6th century, the emperor Justinian engaged in a quixotic effort to reassert the status of Latin as the language of law, even though in his time Latin no longer held any currency as a living language in the East.
Italic languages
Of course, the most famous Indo-European language in Italy is Latin, whose diffusion coincided with the expansion of Roman power. It must be recognized that the Romance languages ended up imposing themselves on the vernacular languages in many of the territories that were occupied by the Roman Empire, making the Italic branch the second most spoken in the world among the Indo-European languages, with about 550 million speakers.
Paganism
By late antiquity, however, it was possible to speak Greek as a primary language while not conceiving of oneself as a Hellene. The long-established use of Greek both in and around the Eastern Roman Empire as a lingua franca ironically allowed it to instead become central in enabling the spread of Christianity—as indicated for example by the use of Greek for the Epistles of Paul. In the first half of the 5th century, Greek was the standard language in which bishops communicated, and the "Acta Conciliorum" ("Acts of the Church Councils") were recorded originally in Greek and then translated into other languages.
Spread of the Latin script
Along with the Latin language, the Latin writing system spread first spread over the Italian Peninsula with the rise of the Roman Republic, especially after 350 BCE. For example, the region of Umbria seems to have switched from its own script in the 2nd century BCE to Latin in the 1st. Next were the lands surrounding the Western Mediterranean Sea: Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, Africa Proconsularis, Numidia, Hispania, and Gallia Transalpina. This continued during the early period of expansion of the Roman Empire (c. 27 BCE – 117 CE) in regions such as Illyria, Rhaetia, Noricum, Dacia, Gaul, Belgica, western Germania, and Britannia. The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet. Despite the loss of the Latin-speaking Western provinces, the Byzantine Empire maintained Latin as its legal language, under 6th-century emperor Justinian I producing the vast Corpus Juris Civilis that would have a major impact on Western European legal history from c. 1100 to 1900. The Germanic peoples that invaded and gradually settled the Western Roman Empire between the 5th and 8th centuries, most notably the Franks (first as the Merovingian script, later the Carolingian minuscule), adopted the Latin script and spread it further.
Languages of the Roman Empire
After the decentralization of political power in late antiquity, Latin developed locally in the Western provinces into branches that became the Romance languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian and Catalan. As an international language of learning and literature, Latin itself continued as an active medium of expression for diplomacy and for intellectual developments identified with Renaissance humanism up to the 17th century, and for law and the Roman Catholic Church to the present.
Holy Roman Empire
In various languages the Holy Roman Empire was known as: , , (before Otto I), (by Otto I), , , , , (before Otto I), (by Otto I). Before 1157, the realm was merely referred to as the "Roman Empire". The term "sacrum" ("holy", in the sense of "consecrated") in connection with the medieval Roman Empire was used beginning in 1157 under Frederick I Barbarossa ("Holy Empire"): the term was added to reflect Frederick's ambition to dominate Italy and the Papacy. The form "Holy Roman Empire" is attested from 1254 onward.
Romance languages
During the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and the collapse of Western half in the fifth and sixth centuries, the spoken varieties of Latin became more isolated from each other, with the western dialects coming under heavy Germanic influence (the Goths and Franks in particular) and the eastern dialects coming under Slavic influence. The dialects diverged from classical Latin at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. The colonial empires established by Portugal, Spain, and France from the fifteenth century onward spread their languages to the other continents to such an extent that about two-thirds of all Romance language speakers today live outside Europe.
Judaeo-Romance languages
Technically Vulgar Judaeo-Latin, rather than Judaeo-Romance, Judaeo-Latin was an unattested presumed language of a range of geographical and register varieties of Latin. It is postulated to have been spoken in specific Jewish communities of the Roman Empire.
Roman Empire
After the decentralization of political power in late antiquity, Latin developed locally into branches that became the Romance languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, and a large number of minor languages and dialects. Today, more than 900 million people are native speakers worldwide.
Vulgar Latin
The collapse of the Western Roman Empire rapidly began to change this. The former western provinces became increasingly isolated from the Eastern Roman Empire, leading to a rapid divergence between the Latin spoken on either side of the Adriatic north of line that ran from northern Albania mid-way through Bulgaria but stopped short of the Black Sea coast which was Greek-speaking. In the West an even more complex transformation was occurring. A blending of cultures was occurring between the former Roman citizens who were fluent in the "proper" Latin speech (which was already substantially different from Classical Latin), and many of the Gothic rulers who, though largely Latinised, tended to speak Latin poorly, speaking what could be considered a pidgin of Latin and their Germanic mother tongue, though this changed over time. Notable among those who spoke Latin well is Theodoric the Great, imperial regent of Italy (493–526) who is reputed to have been illiterate based on his use of stamp to sign documents. Since he lived as a hostage of Emperor Leo I at the Great Palace of Constantinople from 461 to 471 (from age 7 to 17) and was well-educated by Constantinople's best teachers, it difficult to believe he did not know Greek and Latin.
Latino-Faliscan languages
Latin eventually absorbed the others and replaced Faliscan as the power of Ancient Rome expanded. All members of the group other than Latin went extinct. Latin, in turn, via Vulgar Latin, developed into the Romance languages, which are now spoken by more than 800 million people worldwide, largely due to the influence of the French, Spanish and Portuguese Empires.
Romansh language
Romansh is a Romance language descending from Vulgar Latin, the spoken language of the Roman Empire. Within the Romance languages, Romansh stands out because of its peripheral location, which has resulted in several archaic features. Another distinguishing feature is the centuries-long language contact with German, which is most noticeable in the vocabulary and to a lesser extent the syntax of Romansh. Romansh belongs to the Gallo-Romance branch of the Romance languages, which includes languages such as French, Occitan, and Lombard. The main feature placing Romansh within the Gallo-Romance languages is the fronting of Latin to or , as seen in Latin "muru(m)" ("wall"), which is or in Romansh.
Classification of Romance languages
However, the history of Romance languages, as we know it, makes the first assumption rather problematic. While the Roman Empire lasted, its educational policies and the natural mobility of its soldiers and administrative officials probably ensured some degree of linguistic homogeneity throughout its territory. Even if there were differences between the Vulgar Latin spoken in different regions, it is doubtful whether there were any sharp boundaries between the various dialects. On the other hand, after the Empire's collapse, the population of Latin speakers was separated—almost instantaneously, by the standards of historical linguistics—into a large number of politically independent states and feudal domains whose populations were largely bound to the land. These units then interacted, merged and split in various ways over the next fifteen centuries, possibly influenced by languages external to the family (as in the so-called Balkan language area).
Languages of the Roman Empire
Illyrian was spoken in the northwest, and to the northeast Thracian and Dacian. These three languages, all Indo-European, are sometimes thought to be earlier forms of Albanian. From his exile in Tomis on the Black Sea (present-day Constanța, Romania), the Augustan poet Ovid learned Getic and Sarmatian, and noted that Greek was spoken with a markedly Getic accent. Inscriptions from Tomis in the Imperial period are generally Greek, with Thracian personal names and religious references.
Languages of the Roman Empire
In the Western Empire, Latin gradually replaced the Celtic languages, which were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin. Commonalities in syntax and vocabulary facilitated the adoption of Latin. Mediterranean Gaul (southern France) had become trilingual (Greek, Latin, Gaulish) by the mid-1st century BC. The importance of Latin in gaining access to the ruling power structure caused the rapid extinction of inscriptions in scripts that had been used to represent local languages on the Iberian peninsula "(Hispania)" and in Gaul. Among other aspects of a distinctive Gallo-Roman culture was the creation of Gallo-Latin text. In Latin commemorative inscriptions, individuals with Celtic names rarely identify themselves as "Celtic" or "Gallic"; they are much more likely to name the people of their "civitas" (such as Aedui, Remi, Pictones) or their voting tribe "(tribus)" as Roman citizens. Several major writers of Latin came from the Iberian peninsula in the Imperial period, including Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian, Martial, and Prudentius. However despite acquisition of Latin, Gaulish is held by some to have held on quite a long time, lasting at least until the middle of the 6th century CE, despite considerable Romanization in the local material culture.
Dacians
Only about half part of Dacia then became a Roman province, with a newly built capital at Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa, 40 km away from the site of Old Sarmisegetuza Regia, which was razed to the ground. The name of the Dacians' homeland, Dacia, became the name of a Roman province, and the name Dacians was used to designate the people in the region. "Roman Dacia", also "Dacia Traiana" or "Dacia Felix", was a province of the Roman Empire from 106 to 271 or 275 AD. Its territory consisted of eastern and southeastern Transylvania, and the regions of Banat and Oltenia (located in modern Romania). Dacia was organised from the beginning as an imperial province, and remained so throughout the Roman occupation. It was one of the empire's Latin provinces; official epigraphs attest that the language of administration was Latin. Historian estimates of the population of Roman Dacia range from 650,000 to 1,200,000.
Italic languages
As the Roman Republic extended its political dominion over the whole of the Italian peninsula, Latin became dominant over the other Italic languages, which ceased to be spoken perhaps sometime in the 1st century AD. From Vulgar Latin, the Romance languages emerged.
Assyrian Neo-Aramaic
Aramaic was the language of commerce, trade and communication and became the vernacular language of Assyria in the late Iron Age and classical antiquity. It became the lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–605 BC), Neo-Babylonian Empire (605–539 BC), the Achaemenid Empire (539–323 BC), the Parthian Empire (247 BC–224 AD), and the Sasanian Empire (224–651 AD). Aramaic writing has been found as far north as Hadrians Wall in Ancient Britain, in the form of inscriptions in Aramaic, made by Assyrian and Aramean soldiers serving in the Roman Legions in northern England during the 2ndcentury AD.
Huns
A variety of languages were spoken within the Hun Empire. Priscus noted that the Hunnic language differed from other languages spoken at Attila's court. He recounts how Attila's jester Zerco made Attila's guests laugh also by the "promiscuous jumble of words, Latin mixed with Hunnish and Gothic." Priscus said that Attila's "Scythian" subjects spoke "besides their own barbarian tongues, either Hunnish, or Gothic, or, as many have dealings with the Western Romans, Latin; but not one of them easily speaks Greek, except captives from the Thracian or Illyrian frontier regions". Some scholars have argued that the Gothic was used as the "lingua franca" of the Hunnic Empire. Hyun Jin Kim argues that the Huns may have used as many as four languages at various levels of government, without any one being dominant: Hunnic, Gothic, Latin, and Sarmatian.
Languages of the Roman Empire
In the 4th century, Coptic script—based on the Greek alphabet with additional characters from Egyptian demotic to reflect Egyptian phonology—is found in documents in several dialects, including Old Bohairic, Fayumic, Achmimic, and Sahidic. At this time Coptic emerged as a fully literary language, including major translations of Greek scriptures, liturgical texts, and patristic works. From the 4th to 7th centuries, original works—including homilies, saints' lives, monastic rules, letters, and exhortations—were composed in Coptic, primarily in the Sahidic dialect. As a writing system, Coptic was used for everyday purposes such as inventories and real estate transactions, as well as for poetry. By the 640s, when Egypt came under Arab rule, Coptic-speaking Christians constituted the majority of the population. At the end of the 7th century, legal texts might still be written in Coptic: in one example, a bilingual Greek-Arabic protocol with a reference to Mohammed precedes a document entirely in Coptic that invokes the Trinity.
Western Roman Empire
As the Western Roman Empire crumbled, the new Germanic rulers who conquered its constituent provinces maintained most Roman laws and traditions. Many of the invading Germanic tribes were already Christianized, although most were followers of Arianism. They quickly changed their adherence to the state church of the Roman Empire. This helped cement the loyalty of the local Roman populations, as well as the support of the powerful Bishop of Rome. Although they initially continued to recognize indigenous tribal laws, they were more influenced by Roman Law and gradually incorporated it. Roman law, particularly the "Corpus Juris Civilis" collected on the orders of Justinian I, is the basis of modern civil law. In contrast, common law is based on Germanic Anglo-Saxon law. Civil law is by far the most widespread system of law in the world, in force in some form in about 150 countries.
Latin as a language did not disappear. Vulgar Latin combined with neighboring Germanic and Celtic languages, giving rise to modern Romance languages such as Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and a large number of minor languages and dialects. Today, more than 900 million people are native speakers of Romance languages worldwide. In addition, many Romance languages are used as lingua francas by non-native speakers.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Soldiers from Palmyra even used their dialect of Aramaic for inscriptions, in a striking exception to the rule that Latin was the language of the military.
Roman Umbria
Before its defeat by and assimilation to the Romans, Umbria was a sovereign state populated by a people speaking the Umbrian language. This circumstance prevailed in history during the early and middle Roman Republic. By the late republic, Umbria was part of Rome. The language was no longer generally spoken.
Byzantine Greeks
Use of the Greek language was already widespread in the eastern parts of the Roman empire when Constantine moved its capital to Constantinople, although Latin was the language of the imperial administration. From the reign of Emperor Heraclius (), Greek was the predominant language amongst the populace and also replaced Latin in administration. At first, the Byzantine Empire had a multi-ethnic character, but following the loss of the non-Greek speaking provinces with the 7th century Muslim conquests it came to be dominated by the Byzantine Greeks, who inhabited the heartland of the later empire: modern Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, and Sicily, and portions of southern Bulgaria, Crimea, and Albania. Over time, the relationship between them and the West, particularly with Latin Europe, deteriorated.
Latin script
The Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Turkey, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Roman law was written in Latin, and the "letter of the law" was tied strictly to the words in which it was expressed. Any language, however, could be binding in more general verbal contracts and procedures grounded in the "ius gentium" or international law. The "ius gentium" was not a written legal code, but was thought to exist among all peoples as a matter of natural law. Roman jurists show a concern for local languages such as Punic, Gaulish, and Aramaic in assuring the correct understanding and application of laws and oaths.
Romance languages
"au" merged with "ō" in the popular speech of Rome already by the 1st century . A number of authors remarked on this explicitly, e.g. Cicero's taunt that the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher had changed his name from "Claudius" to ingratiate himself with the masses. This change never penetrated far from Rome, however, and the pronunciation /au/ was maintained for centuries in the vast majority of Latin-speaking areas, although it eventually developed into some variety of "o" in many languages. For example, Italian and French have as the usual reflex, but this post-dates diphthongization of and the French-specific palatalization > (hence "causa" > French "chose", Italian "cosa" not **"cuosa"). Spanish has , but Portuguese spelling maintains , which has developed to (and still remains as in some dialects, and in others). Occitan, Romanian, southern Italian languages, and many other minority Romance languages still have . A few common words, however, show an early merger with "ō" , evidently reflecting a generalization of the popular Roman pronunciation: e.g. French "queue", Italian "coda" , Occitan "co(d)a", Romanian "coadă" (all meaning "tail") must all derive from "cōda" rather than Classical "cauda" (but notice Portuguese "cauda"). Similarly, Portuguese "orelha", French "oreille", Romanian "ureche", and Sardinian "olícra", "orícla" "ear" must derive from "ōric(u)la" rather than Classical "auris" (Occitan "aurelha" was probably influenced by the unrelated "ausir" < "audīre" "to hear"), and the form "oricla" is in fact reflected in the Appendix Probi.
History of Latin
The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The Romance languages have more than 700 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, as well as in many smaller regions scattered through the world.
Languages of Europe
The Romance languages are descended from varieties of Vulgar Latin spoken in the various parts of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity. Latin was itself part of the (otherwise extinct) Italic branch of Indo-European.
Romance is divided phylogenetically into Italo-Western, Eastern Romance (including Romanian) and Sardinian. The Romance-speaking area in Europe is often referred to as Latin Europe.
History of the Latin script
The Latin alphabet spread from Italy, along with the Latin language, to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Roman Empire, including Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half of the Empire, and as the western Romance languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan, evolved out of Latin they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet.
Roman Empire
Although Greek continued as the language of the Byzantine Empire, linguistic distribution in the East was more complex. A Greek-speaking majority lived in the Greek peninsula and islands, western Anatolia, major cities, and some coastal areas. Like Greek and Latin, the Thracian language was of Indo-European origin, as were several now-extinct languages in Anatolia attested by Imperial-era inscriptions. Albanian is often seen as the descendant of Illyrian, although this hypothesis has been challenged by some linguists, who maintain that it derives from Dacian or Thracian. (Illyrian, Dacian, and Thracian, however, may have formed a subgroup or a Sprachbund; see Thraco-Illyrian.) Various Afroasiatic languages—primarily Coptic in Egypt, and Aramaic in Syria and Mesopotamia—were never replaced by Greek. The international use of Greek, however, was one factor enabling the spread of Christianity, as indicated for example by the use of Greek for the Epistles of Paul.
World language
Historical languages which had international significance as the "lingua franca" of a historical empire include Egyptian in Ancient Egypt; Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic in the various Mesopotamian civilizations and empires in the Ancient Near East; Ancient Greek in the Greek colonies in the form of various dialects, evolving to Koine Greek in the Hellenistic world, after the conquests of Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Empire, and subsequently in the eastern part of the Roman Empire and the territories of the Byzantine Empire; Latin in the Roman Empire and presently as the standard liturgical language for the Catholic faithful worldwide; Classical Chinese in East Asia during the Imperial era of Chinese history; Persian during the various succeeding Persian Empires, and once served as the second lingua franca of the Islamic World after Arabic; Sanskrit during the ancient and medieval historical periods of various states in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia, and like Latin an important liturgical language of the Vedic religions.
Romance languages
The Romance languages for the most part have kept the writing system of Latin, adapting it to their evolution.
One exception was Romanian before the nineteenth century, where, after the Roman retreat, literacy was reintroduced through the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, a Slavic influence. A Cyrillic alphabet was also used for Romanian (Moldovan) in the USSR. The non-Christian populations of Spain also used the scripts of their religions (Arabic and Hebrew) to write Romance languages such as Ladino and Mozarabic in "aljamiado".
Old French
Beginning with Plautus's time (254–184 ), one can see phonological changes between Classical Latin and what is called Vulgar Latin, the common spoken language of the Western Roman Empire. Vulgar Latin differed from Classical Latin in phonology and morphology as well as exhibiting lexical differences. However they were mutually intelligible until the 7th century when Classical Latin 'died' as a daily spoken language, and had to be learned as a second language (though it was long thought of as the formal version of the spoken language). Vulgar Latin was the ancestor of the Romance languages, including Old French.
Languages of the Roman Empire
While the birth certificates and wills of Roman citizens had to be written in Latin until the 220s, in the legal opinion of Ulpian (ca. 215), "fideicommissa" (bequests in trust) were not limited to Latin or even Greek, but could also be created in "Punic, Gaulish or any other" language. Originally, a testator's "fideicommissum" placed the heir under a moral rather than legal obligation, and Ulpian asserted that "any kind of speech contains the obligation of its words, provided that each party understands the other's language himself or through accurate interpreters". The jurist Gaius distinguished between verbal contracts that derived their validity from formulaic utterance in Latin, and obligations expressing a mutual understanding of the "ius gentium" regardless of whether the parties were Roman or not.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Greek continued as the language of the Byzantine Empire, but never replaced certain Afroasiatic languages with which it had long coexisted—primarily Coptic in Egypt, and Aramaic in Syria and Mesopotamia.
History of Romania
The ample influence of the military environment in Dacia is due to the dispersion of the military units (two legiones, 12 alae, 41 cohortes and 13 numeri), in this bridgehead of the Roman Empire defence, contrary (for ex.) to the Rhenish army, which – concentrated at the Germanic lines – was not in position to influence the spoken Latin in whole Gallia. The disclosure of numerous words which belong to the military (Dacian-)Roman environment – 52 semantic specific changes and inherited military Latin words with their classic sense – grounds the thesis that the Romanian language is the continuer of the military Latin spoken in the north-eastern frontier region of the Roman Empire. These military vestiges particularise the Romanian language in the neolatin area. Thus, the Romanian language becomes scientifically very interesting, from a linguistic and historical view-point, because the other frontier regions of the Roman Empire in Europe, Asia and Africa are not today Romances. Also, the conservation in Romanian language of these numerous vestiges of Latin military slang (sermo castrensis) and their absence/forgetfulness in Aromanian (Balkan Romanian dialect spoken in peaceful area) – such as a (se)aţine ("to waylay"), coif ("helmet"), împărat ("emperor"), a împresura ("encircle with pressure"), a (se) (în)cumeta ("to venture"), a înţina ("to make thin a tree for its collapse on the invaders"), aţinat ("made thin a tree"), mire "fiancé" (< Lat. miles "soldiers", metonymy), a purcede ("to advance"), a răpune ("to kill"), rost "sense" a.s.o. (< Lat. rostrum "beak at prow of Roman warship"), (n)sat "village" (< Lat. fossatum "trench for defence", metonymy), şes "plain" (< Lat. sessus "plane place for camping", metonymy), a supune ("to subject"), tindă "veranda" (< Lat. tenda sub vallo "tent out of agglomerated fortress", metonymy), ţară "homeland" (< Lat. earth ˃ Arom. ţară "earth") a.s.o. – proves the continuity of the latinophones in the northern Danubian region by terrible and heroic battles, in order to safeguard their lands, existence, ethnicity (language and culture) and (military) honour, against the secular attacks of the barbarian (Germanic, Turanian, and Slav) tribes – after, states. This linguistic evidence challenges the Roeslerian theory. The vestiges from sermo castrensis particularize the Romanian language in the neolatin area, together with its isolated history.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Latin was the language of the Romans from the earliest known period. Writing under the first Roman emperor Augustus, Virgil emphasizes that Latin was a source of Roman unity and tradition. In Virgil's epic "Aeneid" about the founding of Rome, the supreme deity Jupiter dictates that the refugee Trojans who have come to settle in Italy will use the language of the native Latini as a means of unification: "they will keep the speech "(sermo)" and "mores" of their fathers ... and I will make them all Latins with one mode of expression" "(uno ore," literally "with one mouth"). The Julio-Claudian emperors, who claimed descent from the Virgilian hero Aeneas, encouraged high standards of correct Latin "(Latinitas)", a linguistic movement identified in modern terms as Classical Latin, and favored Latin for conducting official business.
Western Europe
Prior to the Roman conquest, a large part of Western Europe had adopted the newly developed La Tène culture. As the Roman domain expanded, a cultural and linguistic division appeared between the mainly Greek-speaking eastern provinces, which had formed the highly urbanized Hellenistic civilization, and the western territories, which in contrast largely adopted the Latin language. This cultural and linguistic division was eventually reinforced by the later political east-west division of the Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire controlled the two divergent regions between the 3rd and the 5th century.
Romance languages
During the political decline of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, there were large-scale migrations into the empire, and the Latin-speaking world was fragmented into several independent states. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by Germanic and Slavic tribes, as well as by Huns. These incursions isolated the Vlachs from the rest of Romance-speaking Europe.
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was among the most powerful economic, cultural, political and military forces in the world of its time. It was one of the largest empires in world history. At its height under Trajan, it covered 5 million square kilometres. It held sway over an estimated 70 million people, at that time 21% of the world's entire population. The longevity and vast extent of the empire ensured the lasting influence of Latin and Greek language, culture, religion, inventions, architecture, philosophy, law and forms of government over the empire's descendants. Throughout the European medieval period, attempts were even made to establish successors to the Roman Empire, including the Empire of Romania, a Crusader state; and the Holy Roman Empire. By means of European colonialism following the Renaissance, and their descendant states, Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian culture was exported on a worldwide scale, playing a crucial role in the development of the modern world.
Romance languages
With the rise of the Roman Empire, Vulgar Latin spread first throughout Italy and then through southern, western, central, and southeast Europe, and northern Africa along parts of western Asia.
History of the Balkans
The local Romans and Romanized remnants of the Iron Age populace of the Balkans began their assimilation into mainly the Slavs and Greeks, however, notable Latin-speaking communities are known to have survived. In literature, these Romance-speakers are known as "Vlachs". In Dacia, Roman colonists and Romanized Dacians retreated in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania after the Roman withdrawal. Archaeological evidence indicate a Romanized population in Transylvania by at least the 8th century. By the 7th and 8th centuries, the Roman Empire existed only south of the Danube River in the form of the Byzantine Empire, with its capital at Constantinople. In this ethnically diverse closing area of the Roman Empire, Vlachs were recognized as those who spoke Latin, the official language of the Byzantine Empire used only in official documents, until the 6th century when it was changed to the more popular Greek. These original Vlachs probably consisted of a variety of ethnic groups (most notably Thracians, Dacians, Illyrians) who shared the commonality of having been assimilated in language and culture of the Roman Empire with the Roman colonists settled in their areas. Anna Comnene relates in Alexiade about Dacians (instead of Vlachs) from Balkans and from the North side of Danube and they were identified as Romanians. Romance-speaking populations survived on the Adriatic, and the Albanians are believed by some to be descending from partially Romanized Illyrians.
History of Latin
All Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of soldiers, settlers, and slaves of the Roman Empire, which was substantially different from that of the Roman "literati". Between 200 BC and AD 100, the expansion of the Empire and the administrative and educational policies of Rome made Vulgar Latin the dominant vernacular language over a wide area which stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to the west coast of the Black Sea. During the Empire's decline and after its collapse and fragmentation in the 5th century, Vulgar Latin began to evolve independently within each local area, and eventually diverged into dozens of distinct languages. The overseas empires established by Spain, Portugal and France after the 15th century then spread these languages to other continents – about two thirds of all Romance speakers are now outside Europe.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Latin was needed for Imperial service and advancement, and was the language used for the internal functioning of government. Edicts and official communications of the emperor were in Latin, including rulings on local laws that might be in another language.
Romanian language
The Dacian language was an Indo-European language spoken by the ancient Dacians, mostly north of the Danube river but also in Moesia and other regions south of the Danube. It may have been the first language to influence the Latin spoken in Dacia, but little is known about it. Dacian is usually considered to have been a northern branch of the Thracian language, and, like Thracian, Dacian was a satem language.
Legacy of the Roman Empire
The Latin language of ancient Rome, epitomized by the Classical Latin used in Latin literature, evolved during the Middle Ages and remains in use in the Roman Catholic Church as Ecclesiastical Latin. Vulgar Latin, the common tongue used for regular social interactions, evolved simultaneously into the various Romance languages that exist today (notably Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.). Although the Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th century AD, the Eastern Roman Empire continued until its conquest by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century AD and cemented the Greek language in many parts of the Eastern Mediterranean even after the Early Muslim conquests of the 7th century AD. Although there has been a small modern revival of the Hellenistic religion with Hellenism, ancient Roman paganism was largely displaced by Roman Catholic Christianity after the 4th century AD and the Christian conversion of Roman emperor Constantine I (r. 306-337 AD). The Christian faith of the late Roman Empire continued to evolve during the Middle Ages and remains a major facet of the religion and the psyche of the modern Western world.
Reich
The term "Reich" was part of the German names for Germany for much of its history. Reich was used by itself in the common German variant of the Holy Roman Empire, ('). "Der rîche" was a title for the Emperor. However, Latin, not German, was the formal legal language of the medieval Empire ('), so English-speaking historians are more likely to use Latin ' than German ' as a term for this period of German history. The common contemporary Latin legal term used in documents of the Holy Roman Empire was for a long time "regnum" ("rule, domain, empire", such as in "Regnum Francorum" for the Frankish Kingdom) before "imperium" was in fact adopted, the latter first attested in 1157, whereas the parallel use of "regnum" never fell out of use during the Middle Ages.
Romansh language
Romansh originates from the spoken Latin brought to the region by Roman soldiers, merchants, and officials following the conquest of the modern-day Grisons area by the Romans in 15 BC. Before that, the inhabitants spoke Celtic and Raetic languages, with Raetic apparently being spoken mainly in the Lower Engadine valley. Traces of these languages survive mainly in toponyms, including village names such as Tschlin, Scuol, Savognin, Glion, Breil/Brigels, Brienz/Brinzauls, Purtenza, and Trun. Additionally, a small number of pre-Latin words have survived in Romansh, mainly concerning animals, plants, and geological features unique to the Alps, such as "camutsch" 'chamois' and "grava" 'scree'.
It is unknown how rapidly the Celtic and Raetic inhabitants were Romanized following the conquest of Raetia. Some linguists assume that the area was rapidly Romanized following the Roman conquest, whereas others think that this process did not end until the 4th or 5th century, when more thoroughly Romanized Celts from farther north fled south to avoid invasions by Germanic tribes. The process was certainly complete and the pre-Roman languages extinct by the 5th–6th century, when Raetia became part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom. Around 537 AD, the Ostrogoths handed over the province of Raetia Prima to the Frankish Empire, which continued to have local rulers administering the so-called Duchy of Chur. However, after the death of the last Victorid ruler, Bishop Tello, around 765, Charlemagne assigned a Germanic duke to administer the region. Additionally, the Diocese of Chur was transferred by the Roman Catholic Church from the Archdiocese of Milan to the Diocese of Mainz in 843. The combined effect was a cultural reorientation towards the German-speaking north, especially as the ruling élite now comprised almost entirely speakers of German.
Language of the New Testament
Koine Greek remained the dominant language in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, extending into the Byzantine Empire as Byzantine Greek. In the city of Rome, Koine Greek was in widespread use among ordinary people, and the elite spoke and wrote Greek as fluently as Latin. Jewish Koine Greek did not exist as a separate dialect, but some Jewish texts in Koine Greek do show the influence of Aramaic in syntax and the influence of Biblical background in vocabulary.
Romance languages
Romania did not establish a colonial empire, but beyond its native territory in southeastern Europe, the Romanian language is spoken as a minority language by autochthonous populations in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Hungary, and in some parts of the former Greater Romania (before 1945), as well as in Ukraine (Bukovina, Budjak) and in some villages between the Dniester and Bug rivers. The Aromanian language is spoken today by Aromanians in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, and Greece. Romanian also spread to other countries on the Mediterranean (especially the other Romance-speaking countries, most notably Italy and Spain), and elsewhere such as Israel, where it is the native language of five percent of the population, and is spoken by many more as a secondary language. This is due to the large number of Romanian-born Jews who moved to Israel after World War II. And finally, some 2.6 million people in the former Soviet republic of Moldova speak a variety of Romanian, called variously Moldovan or Romanian by them.
Roman Britain
Unlike many other areas of the Western Roman Empire, the current majority language is not a Romance language - or a language descended from the pre-Roman inhabitants. The British language at the time of the invasion was Common Brittonic, and remained so after the Romans withdrew. It later split into regional languages, notably Cumbric, Cornish, Breton and Welsh. Examination of these languages suggests some 800 Latin words were incorporated into Common Brittonic (see Brittonic languages). The current majority language, English, is based on the languages of the Germanic tribes who migrated to the island from continental Europe from the 5th century onwards.
History of the Balkans
The Byzantine Empire was the Greek-speaking, Eastern Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, centered at its capital in Constantinople. During most of its history it controlled provinces in the Balkans and Asia Minor. The Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian for a time retook and restored much of the territory once held by the unified Roman Empire, from Spain and Italy, to Anatolia. Unlike the Western Roman Empire, which met a famous if rather ill-defined death in the year 476 AD, the Eastern Roman Empire came to a much less famous but far more definitive conclusion at the hands of Mehmet II and the Ottoman Empire in the year 1453. Its expert military and diplomatic power ensured inadvertently that Western Europe remained safe from many of the more devastating invasions from eastern peoples, at a time when the still new and fragile Western Christian kingdoms might have had difficulty containing it.
Origin of the Romanians
The words ""torna, torna fratre"" recorded in connection with a Roman campaign across the Balkan Mountains by Theophylact Simocatta and Theophanes the Confessor evidence the development of a Romance language in the late 6th century. The words were shouted "in native parlance" by a local soldier in 587 or 588. When narrating the rebellion of bulgar noble Kuber and his people against the Avars, the 7th-century "Miracles of St. Demetrius" mentions that a close supporter of his, Mauros spoke four languages, including "our language" (Greek) and "that of the Romans" (Latin). Kuber led a population of mixed originincluding the descendants of Roman provincials who had been captured in the Balkans in the early 7th centuryfrom the region of Sirmium to Thessaloniki around 681.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Around 700 AD, Greek was replaced for administrative use by Arabic, the language of the conquerors. Coptic began to decline, and from this point was preserved mainly for liturgical purposes.
Romanian language
Romanian descended from the Vulgar Latin spoken in the Roman provinces of Southeastern Europe. Roman inscriptions show that Latin was primarily used to the north of the so-called Jireček Line (a hypothetical boundary between the predominantly Latin- and Greek-speaking territories of the Balkan Peninsula in the Roman Empire), but the exact territory where Proto-Romanian (or Common Romanian) developed cannot certainly be determined. Most regions where Romanian is now widely spokenBessarabia, Bukovina, Crișana, Maramureș, Moldova, and significant parts of Munteniawere not incorporated in the Roman Empire. Other regionsBanat, western Muntenia, Oltenia and Transylvaniaformed the Roman province of Dacia Traiana for about 170 years. According to the "continuity" theory, modern Romanian is the direct descendant of the Latin dialect of Dacia Traiana and developed primarily in the lands now forming Romania; the concurring "immigrationist" theory maintains that Proto-Romanian was spoken in the lands to the south of the Danube and Romanian-speakers settled in most parts of modern Romania only centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Romania
The official language is Romanian, a Romance language (the most widely spoken of the Eastern Romance branch), which presents a consistent degree of similarity to Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian, but equally shares many features with the rest of the Western Romance languages, specifically Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. The Romanian alphabet contains the same 26 letters of the standard Latin alphabet, as well as 5 additional ones (namely 'ă','â','î','ț', and 'ș'), totaling 31.
Byzantine Empire
The use of Latin as the language of administration persisted until adoption of Greek as the sole official language by Heraclius in the 7th century. Scholarly Latin would rapidly fall into disuse among the educated classes although the language would continue to be at least a ceremonial part of the Empire's culture for some time. Additionally, Latin remained a minority language in the Empire, mainly on the Italian peninsula and along the Dalmatian coast, eventually developing into various Romance languages like Dalmatian.
Proto-Romanian language
Proto-Romanian (also known as "Common Romanian", "româna comună" or "Ancient Romanian", "străromâna", "Balkan Latin") is a hypothetical and unattested Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin and considered to have been spoken by the ancestors of today's Romanians and related Balkan Latin peoples (Vlachs) before 900 (7th–11th century AD).
Eastern Romance languages
According to the generally accepted theory regarding their origin, the Eastern Romance languages, are considered to be a evolution of the Vulgar-Latin, spoken in the Balkan area during the domination of the Roman Empire. The Vulgar-Latin, in its turn, is considered to be a mixture of the ancient, local languages: Illyrian, Thracian, Dacian, and the official Latin (the language of Rome). It formed for centuries a language continuum, spread across the Balkans.
After the arrival of Slavic people in the region ( V-VII cent.), many of the indigenous people were assimilated while others were obliged to move and disperse, losing in that way the homogeneity and the previous contacts between them. As a result, the formation of the four languages, that nowadays constitute the Eastern branch of the Romance Languages family, took place.
Dacian language
Under the emperor Aurelian (r. 270-5), the Romans withdrew their administration and armed forces, and possibly a significant proportion of the provincial population, from the part of Dacia they ruled. The subsequent linguistic status of this region is disputed. Traditional Romanian historiography maintains that a Latin-speaking population persisted into medieval times, to form the basis of today's 
Romanian-speaking inhabitants. But this hypothesis lacks evidential basis (e.g. the absence of any post-275 Latin inscriptions in the region, other than on imported Roman coins/artefacts). What is certain is that by AD 300, the entire North Danubian region had fallen under the political domination of Germanic-speaking groups, a hegemony that continued until c. AD 500: the Goths held overall hegemony, and under them, lesser Germanic tribes such as the Taifali and Gepids. Some historians consider that the region became Germanic-speaking during this period. At least one part, Wallachia, may have become Slavic-speaking by AD 600, as it is routinely referred to "Sklavinía" (Greek for "Land of the Slavs") by contemporary Byzantine chroniclers. The survival of the Dacian language in this period is impossible to determine, due to a complete lack of documentation. However, it is generally believed that the language was extinct by AD 600.
Languages of the Roman Empire
In the Eastern empire, laws and official documents were regularly translated into Greek from Latin. Both languages were in active use by government officials and the Church during the 5th century. From the 6th century, Greek culture was studied in the West almost exclusively through Latin translation. Latin loanwords appear liberally in Greek texts on technical topics from late antiquity and the Byzantine period.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Among other reforms, the emperor Diocletian (reigned 284–305) sought to renew the authority of Latin, and the Greek expression ἡ κρατοῦσα διάλεκτος "(hē kratousa dialektos)" attests to the continuing status of Latin as "the language of power." The scholar Libanius (4th century) regarded Latin as causing a decline in the quality of Greek rhetoric. In the early 6th century, the emperor Justinian engaged in a quixotic effort to reassert the status of Latin as the language of law, even though in his time Latin no longer held any currency as a living language in the East.
Western Europe
Western European languages mostly fall within two Indo-European language families: the Romance languages, descended from the Latin of the Roman Empire; and the Germanic languages, whose ancestor language (Proto-Germanic) came from southern Scandinavia.
Romance languages are spoken primarily in the southern and central part of Western Europe, Germanic languages in the northern part (the British Isles and the Low Countries), as well as a large part of Northern and Central Europe.
Dacian language
It is also argued that the Dacian language may form the substratum of the Proto-Romanian language, which developed from the Vulgar Latin spoken in the Balkans north of the Jirecek line, which roughly divides Latin influence from Greek influence. About 300 words in Eastern Romance languages, Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, may derive from Dacian, and many of these show a satem-reflex. Whether Dacian forms the substratum of Proto-Romanian is disputed, yet this theory does not rely only on the Romanisation having occurred in Roman Dacia, as Dacian was also spoken in Moesia and northern Dardania. Moesia was conquered by the Romans more than a century before Dacia, and its Latinity is confirmed by Christian sources.
The Dacian / Thracian substratum of Romanian is often connected to the words shared between Romanian and Albanian. The correspondences between these languages reflect a common linguistic background. Linguists like Eric Hamp, PB.P.Hasdeu, I.I.Russu and many others, see the Romanian language as a completely Romanised Daco-Moesian (Albanoid) language, whereas Albanian is a partly Romanised Daco-Moesian language. However, Dacian and Illyrian may have been more similar than most linguists believe, according to Van Antwerp Fine.
Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin or Sermo Vulgaris ("common speech"), also Colloquial Latin, or Common Romance (particularly in the late stage), was a range of non-standard sociolects of Latin (as opposed to Classical Latin, the standard and literary version of the language) spoken in the Mediterranean region during and after the classical period of the Roman Empire.
History of the Roman Canon
It is also known that this Mass was said in Greek. Koine Greek was the common tongue of Christians, at least outside Palestine, when it was used throughout the empire since the conquests of Alexander the Great, later incorporated into the Roman Empire. This is shown by the facts that the inscriptions in the catacombs are in Greek, and that Christian writers at Rome use that language.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Koine Greek had become the common language of the eastern Mediterranean and into Asia Minor after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Lucian even imagines that Greek is the universal language of the dead in the underworld. In late antiquity, a Greek-speaking majority lived in the Greek peninsula and islands, major cities of the East, western Anatolia, and some coastal areas. Greek continued as the language of the Eastern Roman Empire, and developed into a distinctive medieval Greek that gave rise to modern Greek.
The emperor Claudius tried to limit the use of Greek, and on occasion revoked the citizenship of those who lacked Latin. Even in addressing the Roman Senate, however, he drew on his own bilingualism in communicating with Greek-speaking ambassadors. Suetonius quotes him as referring to "our two languages," and the employment of two imperial secretaries, one for Greek and one Latin, dates to his reign.
Late Latin
Not everyone agrees that the lingua franca came to an end with the fall of Rome, but argue that it continued and became the language of the reinstituted Carolingian Empire (predecessor of the Holy Roman Empire) under Charlemagne. Toward the end of his reign his administration conducted some language reforms. The first recognition that Late Latin could not be understood by the masses and therefore was not a lingua franca was the decrees of 813 AD by synods at Mainz, Rheims Tours that from then on preaching was to be done in a language more understandable to the people, which was stated by Tours Canon 17 as "rustica Romana lingua", identified as proto-Romance, the descendant of Vulgar Latin. Late Latin as defined by Meillet was at an end; however, Pucci's Harrington's "Mediaeval Latin" sets the end of Late Latin when Romance began to be written, "Latin retired to the cloister" and ""Romanitas" lived on only in the fiction of the Holy Roman Empire." The final date given by those authors is AD 900.
Roman commerce
The commerce of the Roman Empire was a major sector of the Roman economy during the early Republic and throughout most of the imperial period. Fashions and trends in historiography and in popular culture have tended to neglect the economic basis of the empire in favor of the lingua franca of Latin and the exploits of the Roman legions. The language and the legions were supported by trade while being at the same time part of its backbone. Romans were businessmen and the longevity of their empire was due to their commercial trade.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Latin became the language of conquered areas because local people started speaking it, and not because the population was displaced by Latin-speakers. Latin was not imposed officially on peoples brought under Roman rule. Saint Augustine observed that Romans preferred for Latin to be adopted "per pacem societatis", through a social pact. This language policy contrasts with that of Alexander, who aimed to impose Greek throughout his empire as the official language. Latin was not a requirement for Roman citizenship, and there was no state-supported schooling that privileged it as the medium for education: fluency was desirable for its "high cultural, political, legal, social and economic value".
Angloromani language
'Anglo-Romani' is a term used to describe usage of words of Romani origin within English conversation. The original Romani language was spoken in England until the late nineteenth century; perhaps a generation longer in Wales. It was replaced by English as the everyday and family language of British Romani, but this does not mean the language disappeared entirely. Words of Romani origin were still used as part of a family-language. Words which are occasionally inserted into English conversation are referred to in linguistic literature on Romani as 'Para-Romani': the selective retention of some Romani-derived vocabulary following the disappearance of Romani as an everyday language of conversation.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Because communication in ancient society was predominantly oral, it can be difficult to determine the extent to which regional or local languages continued to be spoken or used for other purposes under Roman rule. Some evidence exists in inscriptions, or in references in Greek and Roman texts to other languages and the need for interpreters. For Punic, Coptic, and Aramaic or Syriac, a significant amount of epigraphy or literature survives. The Celtic languages were widespread throughout much of western Europe, and while the orality of Celtic education left scant written records, Celtic epigraphy is limited in quantity but not rare. The Germanic languages of the Empire have left next to no inscriptions or texts, with the exception of Gothic. Multilingualism contributed to the "cultural triangulation" by means of which an individual who was neither Greek nor Roman might construct an identity through the processes of Romanization and Hellenization.
History of education
The official language of the empire was Quechua, although dozens if not hundreds of local languages were spoken. The Amautas did ensure that the general population learn Quechua as the language of the Empire, much in the same way the Romans promoted Latin throughout Europe; however, this was done more for political reasons than educational ones.
Western world
Ancient Rome (753 BC – AD 476) was a civilization that grew from a city-state founded on the Italian Peninsula about the 8th century BC to a massive empire straddling the Mediterranean Sea. In its 10-centuries expansion, Roman civilization shifted from a small monarchy (753 – 509 BC), to a republic (509 – 27 BC), to an autocratic empire (27 BC – AD 476). It came to dominate Western, Central and Southeastern Europe and the entire area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea through conquest using the Roman legions and then through cultural assimilation by eventually giving Roman citizenship privileges to the whole population. Nonetheless, despite its great legacy, a number of factors led to the eventual decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire succeeded the approximately 500-year-old Roman Republic ( 510 BC – 30 BC), which had been weakened by the conflict between Gaius Marius and Sulla and the civil war of Julius Caesar against Pompey and Marcus Brutus. During these struggles hundreds of senators were killed, and the Roman Senate had been refilled with loyalists of the First Triumvirate and later those of the Second Triumvirate. In 350 years, from the successful and deadliest war with the Phoenicians began in 218 BC to the rule of Emperor Hadrian by AD 117, Ancient Rome expanded up to twenty-five times its area. The same time passed before its fall in AD 476. Rome had expanded long before the empire reached its zenith with the conquest of Dacia in AD 106, under Emperor Trajan. During its territorial peak, the Roman Empire controlled about of land surface and had a population of 100 million. From the time of Caesar (100 – 44 BC) to the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, Rome dominated Southern Europe, the Mediterranean coast of Northern Africa and the Western Middle East, including the ancient trade routes with population living outside. Ancient Rome has contributed greatly to the development of law, war, art, literature, architecture, technology and language in the "Western world", and its history continues to have a major influence on the world today. Latin language has been the base from which Romance languages evolved and it has been the official language of the Catholic Church and all Catholic religious ceremonies all over Europe until 1967, as well as an or the official language of countries such as Poland (9th–18th centuries).
Languages of the Ottoman Empire
The Ottomans had three influential languages: Turkish, spoken by the majority of the people in Anatolia and by the majority of Muslims of the Balkans except in Albania, Bosnia, and various Aegean Sea islands; Persian, initially used by the educated in northern portions of the Ottoman Empire before being displaced by Ottoman Turkish; and Arabic, used in southern portions of the Ottoman Empire; Arabic was spoken mainly in Arabia, North Africa, Mesopotamia and the Levant. Throughout the vast Ottoman bureaucracy Ottoman Turkish language was the official language, a version of Turkish, albeit with a vast mixture of both Arabic and Persian grammar and vocabulary.
Romance languages
The Romance languages (also called Romanic languages or Neo-Latin languages) are the modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the third and eighth centuries and that form a subgroup of the Italic languages within the Indo-European language family.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Greek had been in use in the southern part of the Balkans since the late 4th century BC, as a result of the Macedonian conquests of Philip and Alexander. The ancient Macedonian language, perhaps a Greek dialect, may have been spoken in some parts of what is now Macedonia and northern Greece; to the north of this area, Paeonian would have been used, and to the south Epirot, both scantily attested.
Vulgar Latin
The original written Latin language (what is today referred to as "Classical Latin") was adapted from the actual spoken language of the Latins, with some minor modifications, long before the rise of the Roman Empire. As with many languages, over time the spoken "vulgar" language diverged from the written language, with the written language remaining somewhat static. During the classical period spoken (Vulgar) Latin still remained largely common across the Empire, some minor dialectal differences notwithstanding.