Culture of ancient Rome: Encyclopedia II - Culture of ancient Rome - Language

Culture of ancient Rome - Language

The native language of the Romans was Latin, an Italic language. An inflectional and synthetic language, Latin relies little on word order, conveying meaning through a system of affixes attached to word stems. Its alphabet, the Latin alphabet, is based on the Old Italic alphabet, which is in turn derived from 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 actual spoken language of the Roman Empire was Vulgar Latin, which significantly differed from Classical Latin in grammar, vocabulary, and eventually pronunciation. Also, although Latin remained the main written language of the Roman Empire, Greek came to be the language spoken by the well-educated elite, as most of the literature studied by Romans was written in Greek. In the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which became the Byzantine Empire, Greek eventually supplanted Latin as both the written and spoken language.

The expansion of the Roman Empire spread Latin throughout Europe, and over time Vulgar Latin evolved and dialectized in different locations, gradually shifting into a number of distinct Romance languages beginning in around the 9th century. Many of these languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian, flourished, the differences between them growing greater over time. Although English is Germanic rather than Romantic in origin—Britannia was a Roman province, but the Roman presence in Britain had effectively disappeared by the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions—English borrows heavily from Latin and Latin-derived words, drawing from ecclesiastical usage, from Romance languages like French, and even, more recently, consciously adapting words from Classical Latin authors.

Although Latin is an extinct language with very few remaining fluent speakers, it remains in use in many ways. In particular, Latin has survived through Ecclesiastical Latin, the traditional language of the Roman Catholic Church and the official language of the Vatican City. Although distinct from both Classical and Vulgar Latin in a number of ways, Ecclesiastical Latin was more stable than typical Medieval Latin, and more Classical sensibilities eventually re-emerged in the Renaissance with Humanist Latin. Due to both the prevalence of Christianity and the enduring influence of the Roman civilization, Latin became western Europe's lingua franca, a language used to cross international borders, such as for academic and diplomatic usage. Although it was eventually supplanted in this respect by French in the 19th century and English in the 20th, Latin continues to see heavy use in religious, legal, and scientific terminology, and in academia in general.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Language", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki