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Historical Latin came from the prehistoric language of the Latium region, specifically around the River Tiber, where Roman civilization first developed. How and when Latin came to be spoken has long been debated.
Late Latin is the literary language from the 3rd century AD onward, and Vulgar Latin's various regional dialects had developed by the 6th to 9th centuries into the ancestors of the modern Romance languages. In Latin's usage beyond the early medieval period, it lacked native speakers.
- Protohistory
- Antiquity
- Middle Ages
- Early Modern Period
- 19th Century
- 20th Century
- 21st Century
- Debates and Proposals
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The Latin script originated in archaic antiquity in the Latium region in central Italy. It is generally held that the Latins, one of many ancient Italic tribes, adopted the western variant of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BCE from Cumae, a Greek colony in southern Italy – making the early Latin alphabet one among several Old Italic scripts ...
Latinisation of Italy
Along with the Latin language, the Latin writing system first spread over the Italian Peninsula with the rise of the Roman Republic from the 4th to the 1st century BCE. By the 4th century, the Latin alphabet had been standardised by the city of Rome and begun to dominate Latium. Other local alphabets in Latium fell into disuse, particularly after the Latin War (340–338 BCE). There is evidence for a phase of bilingualism and digraphia in the late 4th and 3rd centuries in Etruria, Campania, Umb...
Western Mediterranean and Gaul
The Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula (206–19 BCE) drove all indigenous writing systems such as the Iberian scripts extinct. Likewise, Caesar's conquest of Gaul (58–50 BCE) sealed the fate of the Greek-derived alphabets used by various Gallic tribes. According to Miles (2013) 'there was a sudden and complete disappearance of Iberian and Gallo-Greek scripts by the mid first century AD.' The Iberian language was spoken until at least the 1st century CE; the Basque language is still spoken...
Eastern Mediterranean and the Roman legacy
The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca after the Macedonian Wars (214–148 BCE) due to the superiority of Ancient Greek culture; Latin was restricted to administrative and military purposes in the Eastern Mediterranean. Only in the western half was Latin widely spoken and written, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet. There...
Migration Period
The Germanic peoples that invaded and gradually settled the Western Roman Empire between the 5th and 8th centuries originally had little written culture to speak of; apart from some runic inscriptions amongst most tribes, there was no written administration or literature, and oral tradition prevailed instead. After the Migration Period (c. 300–800), the Germanic elite not only adopted the Latin script and spread it further, but usually also employed the Latin language for early medieval polit...
Christianisation
The spread of Western Christianity during the early Middle Ages strongly contributed to spreading the Latin script across Europe, especially in areas beyond the old Roman limes that barely had any written culture up to that point, such as Scandinavia and East Central Europe. Western Christian missionaries associated the non-Latin scripts with paganism, and therefore insisted on their abandonment. The European peoples who were gradually converted to Latin Christianity and carved their own alph...
As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, South Western, Northern and Central Europe. The Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic, and Greek speakers around the eastern Mediterranean used the Greek alphabet. The Arabic script was widespread in the Islamic wor...
Africa
The Scramble for Africa (1881–1914), meaning the rapid occupation, colonisation and annexation of inland Africa by European powers, went hand in hand with the spread of literacy amongst native Africans, as the Latin script was introduced where there were other writing systems or none. Until the early 19th century, the Berber peoples in North Africa had two systems: originally Tifinagh, and, following the spread of Islam, the Arabic script as well. French colonists, particularly missionaries a...
Galicia
From the 1830s to the 1880s, Ukrainians in Galicia (then divided between the Austrian Empire and Russian Empire) were engaged in a linguistics controversy known as the Alphabetical War. They discussed whether the Ukrainian language(then known as "Ruthenian") was best written in the Latin script (based on the Czech model) against perceived Russification, or in the Cyrillic script against perceived Polonisation. In the end, Cyrillic prevailed.
Romanian
People speaking Romanian gradually adopted the Latin alphabet in the 19th century, following centuries of usage of the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet. They did so under the influence of nationalism. Some of the earliest to do so were scholars from the late-18th-century Transylvanian School, who modified the Hungarian Latin alphabet for writing Romanian. The linguist Ion Heliade Rădulescu first proposed a simplified version of Cyrillic in 1829, but in 1838, he introduced a mixed alphabet containin...
Albanian
Albanian had used a variety of writing systems since its first attestation in the 12th century, especially Latin (in the north), Greek (in the south), Ottoman and Arabic (favoured by many Muslims). There were attempts at standardisation throughout the 19th century, from 1879 led by the Society for the Publication of Albanian Writings, culminating in the 1908 Congress of Manastir when a single Latin script, Bashkimi, was chosen for the whole language. Although the newly adopted Albanian Latin...
China
After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao Zedong initially considered Latinizing written Chinese, but during his first official visit to the Soviet Union in that year Joseph Stalin, who stopped the Latinizing of all languages in the Soviet Union in 1930, convinced Mao to maintain the existing Chinese writing system. Instead Zhou Youguang created the pinyin system and Chinese characters were simplified. As a remnant of the romanization era, for official writing of...
Serbo-Croatian
Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj devised a uniform Latin alphabet for Croatian in 1835, while in 1818, Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić had developed a Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. In the first half of the 19th century, the Illyrian movement to unite all Southern Slavs (Yugoslavs) culturally, and perhaps also politically, was quite strong, and efforts were made to create a unified literary language that would set the standard for all Yugoslav dialects. The Vienna Literary Agreement (March 1850) betw...
Kazakhstan
Unlike its Turkic neighbours, Kazakhstan did not immediately move towards Latinisation after obtaining statehood in 1991. This was motivated by pragmatic reasons: the government was wary to alienate the country's large Russian-speaking minority (who wrote Russian in Cyrillic), and due to the economic crisis in the early 1990s, a transition was considered fiscally unfeasible at the time. It was not until 2017 that Latin became the official script for the Kazakh languagein Kazakhstan, replacing...
Canada
In October 2019, the organization National Representational Organization for Inuit in Canada (ITK) announced that they will introduce a unified writing system for the Inuit languages in the country. The writing system is based on the Latin alphabet and is modeled after the one used in the Greenlandic language.
Oklahoma
From 2006, a new writing system was developed for the Native American Osage language, challenging the dominance of the Latin script for writing that language.
Bulgaria
In 2001, Austrian slavistics professor Otto Kronsteiner recommended that Bulgaria adopt the Latin script in order to facilitate the country's accession to the European Union. This caused such a scandal that the Veliko Tarnovo University revoked the honorary degree it had previously awarded him (for supporting the Bulgarian viewpoint on the Macedonian language). For many Bulgarians, the Cyrillic alphabet has become an important component of their national identity, and great pride is taken in...
Kosovo
Despite initial resistance from Islamist Kosovo Albanians (who favoured the Arabic script) against the 1908 Congress of Manastir's resolution to adopt the Latin script to write the Albanian language in, Kosovo Albanians came to accept the Albanian Latin alphabet over the course of the early 20th century. Literacy amongst Kosovo Albanians increased from 26% in 1948 to 96.6% (men) and 87.5% (women) in 2007. The Kosovo Serbs have followed the practice of Cyrillic/Latin digraphia in the Republic...
Kyrgyzstan
Adopting the Latin script for the Kyrgyz language has been the subject of discussions in Kyrgyzstan since attaining independence in the 1990s. However, unlike in the other Turkic-dominated former Soviet republics in Central Asia, the issue did not become prominent until its great neighbour Kazakhstan in September 2015 and April 2017 confirmed its previous announcements to Latinise the closely related Kazakh language. Before then, the largely Russian-speaking elite of the country saw no reason...
Oct 22, 2024 · Latin language, Indo-European language in the Italic group and ancestral to the modern Romance languages. During the Middle Ages and until comparatively recent times, Latin was the language most widely used in the West for scholarly and literary purposes.
- The Latin language is an Indo-European language in the Italic group and is ancestral to the modern Romance languages. During the Middle Ages and un...
- A “dead” language is one no longer learned as a first language or used in ordinary communication. Classical Latin, the language of Cicero and Virgi...
- Latin was the lingua franca of scientific work in the West during the Middle Ages, so Western scientists used Latin for naming species of organisms...
Latin became a dead language as it gradually stopped being the main spoken language across Europe. As the Roman Empire declined, so did the use of Latin, and it was gradually replaced by the evolving Romantic languages such as Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
The earliest known Latin inscriptions date from the 7th century bc; Latin literature dates from the 3rd century bc. A gap soon appeared between literary (classical) Latin and the popular spoken language, Vulgar Latin. The Romance languages developed from dialect s of the latter.
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Jan 18, 2024 · The history of Latin, also known as Lingua Latina, begins over 2500 years ago in a small region called Latium, near the Tiber River in central Italy. This was the birthplace of Rome and the Roman Empire, which would later influence much of Europe and other parts of the world.
