The Roman Empire spread Latin around, eventually leaving - through the fall of empire and the
Middle Ages - a bunch of different Romance languages.
Wait, but what about here in Roman Africa?
We know they wrote Latin; we know they spoke it.
Where did it go?
Let's take a journey.
Let's dig into the rare traces of evidence of what an African Romance language could
have been like before it vanished and wonder what kind of Romance language
it might've been.
This is a map, the kind you've seen before in games, books, movies.
It shows the Roman Empire at its greatest extent.
Now let me add another layer of more recent Roman...
Romance stuff.
It shows Romance languages that survived into or nearly to modern times, from português
to català to le français to sicilianu to armãneashti.
I could hardly fit them all.
This isn't a story about them though; it's a mystery about the negative space
between them.
These missing areas tantalize us with their lack of a modern home-grown Romance language.
Our story starts here, in the largest of these areas: North Africa.
Home to a prosperous civilization speaking not Latin but Punic, a Semitic language.
Punic was heard in cities like Karaly, Hippo, Utica meaning "old", and above all their famous
capital "Qart Ḥadasht", Carthage, the "New City".
But across the strait, the Roman Republic is expanding out of Latium, down Italy's boot,
and across into Sicily.
Rome and Carthage will fight it out in not one but three Punic Wars over more than
a hundred years.
Carthage loses and is leveled.
Punic will dwindle but survive, sometimes even in official inscriptions, but written
beneath Latin.
Yes, you speak Latin now!
And your name is Africa.
Rome divided up the land into provinces; the one around Carthage bore the name Africa.
In the late days of the empire these provinces, ranging from Morocco into Libya today, were
combined into this whole Diocese of Africa, one of the most prosperous parts of the empire.
For all that time, the Latin here reads just like Latin.
But as the empire cracks and crumbles, we start to encounter enticing fragments of linguistic
evidence from this "Roman Africa".
The year is 430.
This rich Roman diocese is facing a threat from the north.
The walls of Hippo, one of its most prosperous cities, are surrounded by Gaisericus and his
formidable force.
These are Vandals, with a captial V.
An Eastern Germanic people who made their way into Spain, struggled to fight off both
Romans and Visigoths, and now turn their sights towards Africa.
Inside the walls, the city of Hippo grows hungrier by the day, including one of its
most distinguished residents, Augustinus.
Now in his 70s, Augustine has already left a lofty literary legacy, yet at times he penned
more mundane remarks.
Like this one about the way people around him spoke, our first hint: they can't tell
a "bone" apart from a "mouth".
See, in proper Latin one is "ōs" with a long vowel and the other is short "ŏs", but here
they'd both be "ŏs" because their "ears can't discern the shortening or lengthening of vowels".
The Vandals will conquer this city, Augustine will perish in the siege, but the un-classical
vowels hinted at will live on.
The Vandals set up a kingdom and for one hundred years impose their rule but not their tongue.
This is a wooden tablet found south of Tébessa, Algeria, just one of more than 40 Albertini
Tablets that contain Vandal legal documents written down not in their Germanic Vandal
language but entirely in Latin.
At first glance it looks mostly like good Latin, until you notice all the misspellings.
Take time to analyze those mistakes, because they aren't random.
The lawmakers leave off final M just about as much as they spell it.
They constantly confuse the letters B and V, substituting the letter B for V over 50
times and only using V correctly 14 times!
(A mistake that might be charmingly familiar to any Spanish speakers out there,
but we'll come back to that.)
The Vandal tablets reveal something else, too.
Augustine reminds us that good Latin had long and short vowels using the example of
ŏs vs ōs.
It's true for other vowels, like ĭ versus ī.
That short ĭ evolved in Romance languages East and West to an ē sound, so a Vulgar
Latin pear, pira, became an Italian pera.
But in all the misspellings, the Vandal tablets never do that.
They consistently treat all Is the same: they eat "pirs" not "pears".
Which reminds me of another Romance language: Sardinian.
On Sardinia to this day the way they speak is so unique that it's often treated separately
from the rest of Romance.
While other Romance languages shuffle vowels around, Sardinian simply does not distinguish
long ones from short: a pear isn't a pera, it's a pira.
Just as we're told happened in the early days of African Romance.
We've been ignoring a big part of this story.
Latin and Punic haven't been the only tongues in these North African provinces.
Alongside, before and after them, there are languages that look quite a bit different,
written like this.
To outsiders this was Moorish or Berber, but it's a close-knit bunch of languages spoken
by millions of Amazigh people today.
Look at Tamazight words long enough, and you'll find something curious: layers.
They keep traces of words they've been in contact with throughout the centuries; indeed,
they integrate borrowed words remarkably well and remarkably fast.
Some words recall the Punic days before the Romans took Carthage.
Others are more recent, from Arabic, or even very recent, from French.
But among these layers are words from Latin.
Tricky words.
Some of them keep the shape of a proper, classical nominative case -us.
Others perhaps resemble something out of our lost Romance language, like maybe accusative
case ones without the M just like the Vandal tablets.
One author I read thinks this could explain why Tamazight has -us and -u side by side.
It's a sliver of a fact to go on, but
if true, it fits with what we see in Romance history: a tendency to take a non-nominative
and make it the basic form of a noun.
If African Romance emerged, it emerged in tumultuous times.
Roman rule falls to the Vandals.
Vandals to the Byzantines.
Byzantines give way to the Umayyads.
And throughout all of them, Amazigh people are playing an outsized role... heh, even
Augustine is one.
As are many of those who set out to take Hispania for the Umayyad Caliphate in the year 711.
It's tempting to point to this conquest as a dividing line in history – I've seen that
many times – but look through
the eyes of this period, and you might just see waves of takeovers.
Four new powers in a couple centuries.
But more than most conquests, this one brought a new and lasting era for the region.
Not always in the way you might think.
So here's a question: when the Umayyad clan from Mecca took Spain, and people arrived
from Africa, what language do you think they spoke?
Was it...
Arabic?
Maybe Tamazight?
Considering the histories and finds, according to this scholar it was most likely
some kind of Latin!
And if their African Romance had the feature we guessed it might earlier, failing to tell
B apart from V, its early arrival in Spain could explain a mismatch.
The B/V confusion wasn't absent from Spain, for whom the phrase goes vivere, to live,
is bibere, to drink, but Isidore of Sevilla testifies it's more characteristic of Africa.
And yet it would become so very Spanish.
So then, what if some new arrivals tipped the scales in favor of B?
Or what if... it's just a stretch to pin this on our unknown emerging language, and other
papers warn us V changed from the north instead.
Oh well, what about words?
Did African Romance leave a fingerprint on the local vocabulary?
Go back to Augstine, who told us how Africa avoided that ōs/os confusion: they actually
used an improper word "ossu".
And so did Spain... ah, but that word was popular with the rest of Romance, too.
Instead consider the Romance word for "face".
No, not that one.
Not that one either.
The one heard uniquely throughout Iberia.
Rōstrum meant "beak" in Classical Latin, and rostro still does in Italian, but guess where
a "rostro" turned into "face"?
Hispania and Africa.
For me, it's more guesswork with few answers.
But I can't help [but] follow this story to the end.
Whatever African Romance may have been, it did come to an end.
After it outlasted centuries of conquests, the geographer al-ʾIdrisi writes clearly
in the 1100s about a local tongue and gives it a name not far from what I've been calling
an "African Romance language": al-lisān al-lātīnī al-ʾIfrīqī.
Our final piece of evidence falls close to that late date: the grave inscriptions
of Tripolitania.
These epitaphs do their best to keep Latinic words alive.
They do resort to ditching final M and writing B for V, like we've seen before.
They also often misspell Cs as K. See, Cs in Romance languages changed from /k/ to a
soft sound in /ts/e or /ts/i.
But here in stone we read "pake" and "bikeisima" where Italian has "pace" and "vigesima".
By misspelling KE and KI, these stones insist on preserving an old k sound that other Romance
languages softened to ts, ch or s.
The only other exceptions I know of are the extinct Dalmatian and, again, the living Sardinian.
Like so much of the evidence, it's suggestive, not definitive, but it's our last trace of
African Romance.
As the language fades, a Norman conquest of North Africa, led by the king of Sicily who
bankrolled that geographer, brings contact with new Latinic languages from Europe, and
we'll hear nothing more from this variant of Romance, perhaps on its way to becoming
its own language or languages, that maybe, just maybe if we reach into the past we catch
hints of its lost final Ms, its Bs and Is and KEs and KIs, its distinctive vocabulary,
its affinities with Sardinian.
Maybe.
Thanks for adventuring back into language history and wondering with me.
"Gratias ago", thank you to patrons for keeping me animating and supporting
future linguistic tales.
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