Is Latin dead?

Latin was once spoken throughout the Roman Empire. But today no country officially speaks this language. So, did Latin really disappear when the Roman Empire ceased to exist?

A statue of the Roman emperor Augustus was erected in Germany. Now, if he was resurrected, he wouldn’t be able to understand what his descendants said. Rome was once one of the largest empires in the world, but gradually the empire’s sway over its colonies dwindled until it completely lost control. Even so, Latin continued to be the common language throughout Europe hundreds of years later. The answer to the question of when Latin, the language of ancient Rome, died is a rather complicated one. There is no date in history that marks the end of Latin as a spoken language, and some suggest that’s because it never actually died. The Vatican may still hold some Masses in Latin, but almost no one in Italy uses Latin on a daily basis. However, this does not mean the death of Latin, said Tim Pulju, a senior lecturer in linguistics and classics at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. “Latin isn’t really spoken anymore,” Pulju says. It continues to be spoken as a mother tongue by people in Italy, Gaul, Spain and elsewhere, but like all living languages, it has changed over time.” Importantly, the changes to Latin were distinctive in many different areas of the Old Roman Empire, and over time these differences increased to give rise to entirely new but closely related to each other. “They gradually accumulated over the centuries, so that eventually Latin developed into many different languages, and very different from classical Latin,” says Pulju. Those new languages ​​we now call Romance include French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.” Such language development occurs with every language, such as English. Pulju says: “English has been spoken in Britain for more than a millennium, but it has changed over time. Obviously, if you compare English today with English in Elizabethan times, as seen in the work of the great writer Shakespeare. Elizabethan English, from about four centuries ago, is still mostly understandable to us, but Chaucer’s English, dating back to the 14th century, is much less understandable. And the English of ‘Beowulf’, from around 1000, is very different from modern English, incomprehensible to us today. Even so, no one can say English is a dead language, it simply changes gradually over a long period of time.” The only difference between English and Latin is that Old English evolved into Modern English and Modern English, while Classical Latin diversified and created several different languages. That’s why people tend to think (perhaps erroneously), Latin is an extinct language. However, languages ​​can become extinct; sometimes the native speakers of that language all die, or over time their first language transitions until eventually there are no more fluent speakers of that language. According to Pulju, dead languages ​​are also happening to native languages ​​in many parts of the world today. The Middle Eastern countries are a hotbed of dead languages, which can happen when there is social stigma attached to speaking an unorthodox language, language not being taught in schools and measures. More brutal methods are being practiced, such as ethnic cleansing and violence perpetrated against minorities. UNESCO estimates that at least half of the 7,000 languages ​​spoken in the world today will be extinct before the end of this century. So, when did Latin die? It’s not really dead, it’s simply evolved.