In early AD, the Roman Catholic Church dramatically gained power and influence over the Ancient
Rome.
With Latin as the Church’s preferred language, it too became the language of the Empire,which
at its height was estimated to cover roughly a quarter of the earth’s population..To
put that into perspective, today English is known to some degree by the same fraction
- about a quarter of the world.
So, imagine that roughly 2,000 years from now, NOBODY knows English, and studying it
is a rare speciality.
Today, Latin might not be “extinct”, which would mean it has no living speakers, but
it is certainly “dead”, as it has fallen out of use as a method of communication.
So, what happened to Latin?
Well, it didn’t so much die, as it changed - into Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish
and French, which we conveniently know as the Romance languages.
Romance, for “Rome”.
There are a number of other languages that developed out of Latin, but those five are
the most commonly spoken.
Within all of those languages are Latin roots, tenses, grammar, and other intricacies.
And that’s not surprising, since all the countries where Romance languages are popular
also made up the Western Roman Empire.
It was only around the fall of the empire that Latin died and these new languages were
born.
So why did that happen?
Well, mainly, because Latin is incredibly complex.
It is unique from other languages in that it is “highly inflected”, meaning that
nearly every word is potentially modified based on tense, case, voice, aspect, person,
number, gender, and mood.
As a result, the meaning is always clear, although difficult to parse.
It’s one of the reasons we continue to use it for highly technical fields where clarification
is of the utmost importance, like classifying species or in medical terminology.
When the Roman Empire collapsed, each distinct ethnic region appropriated their own version
of what was called Vulgar Latin.
Vulgar here means “common”.
While standard Latin was incredibly useful for description, simple communication did
not have to rely on complex grammar.
As we know from different dialects in English, like African American Vernacular English and
Chicano English, grammar, word choice, and even sentence structure end up naturally diverging
from the quote-unquote “correct” version.
So a Latin word like the “number three”, “tres”, translates into tre in Italian,
tres in Spanish, and trois in French, all similar but culturally distinct.
Nonetheless, due to the overwhelming prevalence of Latin in early Western literature, medicine,
and science, Latin as a language of antiquity never quite went extinct, and today a huge
number of technical fields maintain its usage.
Even English still uses a huge number of Latinate roots, despite modern English developing out
of Old English, and before that, Proto-German.
According to some estimates, more than 60% of English is made up of Greek or Latin roots,
mostly Latin, as a result of English being heavily influenced by French.
In the end, although Latin is dead, it lives on in languages spoken by roughly a billion
people around
the world.