I’m wondering how the Roman Empire (I include the Republic period in this, I am talking about the Empire for the sake of the amount of territories under Roman rule) operate on the level of languages:
-I suppose the civil servants sent by Rome to oversee Roman regions were totally proficient in Latin, but what about the local ones they had to use? And did the Roman administrative body sent on the various territories of the Empire able to master (or chosen because of their mastery of) foreign languages?
-Did Rome expect everybody to speak Latin (and if not, how much of a trouble was it in those times to not understand the language of a land you had to deal with. In our days, it would sound like a very serious chore, but I never see the issue being mentioned as a big problem by historians or chroniclers of that time)?
-BTW, did the various regions develop various (recorded) Latin accents (I realise Latin,and variations on it, are the bases of a good deal of Europe’s languages, but did that already exist at the time of the Roman Empire)?
In a lot of portrayals of the Roman Empire, it seems you can roam around under Roman ruled regions and everybody is fluent in Latin. How much of that is true?
It seems weird to me. I cant get my head around it, I’ve always had that view of Middle Ages travellers that they had to resort to just a few common words understandable by everyone (my view of the Lingua Franca), I have trouble seeing why people would be that much more educated during Roman times.
My question is kind of broken down into several because I have very limited knowledge of the question, if a Doper educated on the subject feels the need to reformulate it to better answer, by all means, do.
I think they spoke and wrote mainly in Latin and Greek, and that they expected that if you wanted to do business with the empire or with companies in the empire you would have to learn one of those languages. Most educated people were probably expected to know those two in addition to whatever local language they used.
That isn’t to say that everyone would have known Latin or Greek, but my guess is if you were a citizen or you did business with the Romans you’d have to know one or both and speak and write it fluently enough to communicate.
(IIRC, not even every person in the army knew one or both languages, though, so I guess they must have had NCOs or officers fluent in the local languages AND in Latin/Greek…but that might just be a History Channel fact, devoid of any semblance of reality)
I recall learning that there were Latin dialects in the Empire days, and that the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) arose from those common dialects rather than the “educated” court Latin.
I wonder about the other languages matter. Would Roman garrisons or posts have Germanic or Celtic interpreters? The Romans came into major contact with people speaking those languages.
the Eastern Mediterranean was speaking Greek long before the Romans, at least in the cities. Egyptian peasants did not speak Greek, but then who wants to go talk to the Egyptian peasants in the first place?
France and Spain spoke in a lower register of Latin (mix of Latin with the local “barbarian” languages) whereas their elite people would know the higher register. Later on these local lower registers got even more of a “barbarian” infusion from Germanic invaders and became known as “French” and “Spanish”.
Keep in mind, incidentally, that the conquest of many of the areas in the West, especially in France and England, were genocidally brutal affairs. That’s one of the reasons why the local languages ended up being based on the language of the conqueror. There were relatively few surviving conquered, and many of them ended up as wives/female slaves raising children of Latin speaking fathers.
Another issue I think would be the patterns of settlement before and after Roman conquest. Eastern Mediterranean had cities that had Greek as the main language. So short of debellation which mostly did not happen there Greek remained as the essential language of commerce for everybody, including migrants from the West. Whereas in pre-Roman Western Europe cities were scarce and not all of them survived the conquest. So even if a whole lot of peasants in Gaul survived with their villages and languages intact, if they were to go to the local Roman-run city to trade, they would need to speak a Latin-based language.
I recently read an article, which I can’t trace now that I want it. It asserted that the everyday language of the City of Rome may have been demotic Greek not Latin. It reflected the immigrant make-up of the population (including a large number of imported slaves from the Eastern Mediterranean). There’s a parallel with some American cities where the official language is English but a large proportion of the population speaks Spanish.
There are writings from around the time of Caesar making fun of various accents-- IIRC, Catullus wrote a few.
And I thought it was pretty well established that Greek was widely spoken by the masses of Rome. Wasn’t that why Cicero gave speeches in Greek, to appeal to the masses?
OK, there’s no way this was true when Rome was a bunch of tribesmen living in mud huts, right? So when did this come to be the case? During the Republic?
There were Greek colonies in southern Italy by 700 BC, so some of them could have been speaking Greek in Rome as early as then (along with Phoenician, Etriuscan, etc.)
The Greeks controlled or influenced the Mediterranean long before Rome became a power, and even had colonies in Italy and Sicily. Even after Rome started to become a regional power and started butting heads with the Greeks the Romans still looked up to them as a more cultured and civilized power…hell, they still felt strongly towards Greece even after Rome became the dominant power in the Med and had conquered Greece and made it part of the empire.
The people who Imperial governors would come into contact with would all speak Latin or Greek, so he could understand them. The average person in the province who didn’t speak Latin or Greek, the Imperial governor really didn’t care about or pay attention to, so long as he paid his taxes and didn’t revolt. If by some chance, the Imperial governor had to speak to somebody who didn’t know Latin or Greek, he’d use an interpreter.
Legionaries would know their native language, and maybe some Latin or Greek, and maybe some pidgin.
It works the same way in modern colonial empires: it doesn’t matter whether the colonisers speak English, French, Russian or Japanese – those who want to do business with them will learn enough of the language to do that. And children growing up in such an environment will naturally pick up multiple languages. So young Jesus son of Joseph the carpenter, growing up in Bethlehem in the first decade A.D. would certainly have learned Aramaic (the local language), Greek (the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean) and Hebrew (the language of his religion). He probably also learned Latin (the language of Rome) and a bit of Coptic (the language of Egypt).
Right, but if Greek was the majority language of Rome back before they’d even managed to control the entire peninsula, why would anyone have used Latin? It’s a little confusing to hear people talking up the history of Rome like it was a Greek-speaking concern from day one but, of course, French and Spanish are derived from Latin because that’s what the Roman conquerors spoke.
All this makes sense, but it doesn’t quite answer my question.
No doubts those conquests were were brutal, but not genocidal (or provide some cite). Gaul was relatively populated, and many tribes and their cities thrived after the conquest. Not a few Celt rulers adapted very happily to the new order of things.
Gaulish didn’t dissapear overnight (although the moment when it completely dissapeared is debated, some have even stated that in some places it survived longer than the Roman Empire), and the Celtic language of the conquered part of Great Britain (or rather its descendants) is still alive in Wales and Britanny.
Greek wasn’t the majority language of Rome. It was just the language of the powerful, rich, civilized culture that controlled Southern Italy. As a result, you’d learn Greek if you wanted to travel, trade, conduct diplomacy or simply learn stuff. That or Etruscan, that dominated the area north of Rome (and in fact, even Rome itself).
But it wouldn’t prevent people from speaking Latin (or in other places its sister languages) amongst themselves. And your average shepherd probably had no use for either language and didn’t know them.
When Rome in turn became the dominating power, naturally, the language you needed to know became Latin. But although Etruscan eventually disappeared completely (out of my head maybe around 100 AD, but I might be completely wrong on this one), Greek was already too widely used as a lingua franca in the eastern part of the empire, and, as already mentioned, too prestigious even from the point of view of the Romans to be displaced by Latin there. So, the Roman Empire ended up using mostly Latin in the west and Greek in the east.
Also, many other languages survived the Roman conquest : Aramean in the middle-east (itself a former Lingua Franca), Coptic in Egypt, Berber in North Africa (still widely spoken nowadays), etc…
Almost no conquest was “genocidal”. In some cases masses of people were pushed about by invaders, but you’d have to provide some strong cites that they were ever just completely wiped out by invaders.
As my cite to show otherwise, I give you Cheddar Man.
Bryan Sykes’ research into Cheddar Man was filmed as he performed it in 1997. As a means of connecting Cheddar Man to the living residents of Cheddar village, he compared mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) taken from twenty living residents of the village to that extracted from Cheddar Man’s molar. It produced two exact matches and one match with a single mutation. The two exact matches were schoolchildren, and their names were not released. The close match was a history teacher named Adrian Targett. They, like anyone else carrying haplogroup U5 today, share a common ancestor many thousands of years ago with Cheddar Man through his maternal line.
So 9,000 years after this guy died, there are still direct relations living in the nearby town. Through all the different population invasions that happened to Britain.
I suggest that old cultures don’t get wiped out, they assimilate with their conquerers, just as continues in the modern world.
I think it would have been very similar to the situation in India under British rule. Official business conducted in the language of empire with the majority speaking their local language. A lot of people, particularly mobile groups like sailors, merchants and soldiers, would have been multilingual, with varying proficiency across a range of languages
clairobscur: OK, that makes sense, but it does make me more interested in when, as Chronos said, Greek became the majority language of the city of Rome itself.
Well, it probably shouldn’t be taken as a cite (except for the fact that it was common knowledge), but Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar mentions Cicero delivering a speech in Greek.
Quoth Chimera:
It being the maternal line, though, that doesn’t prove much. That still leaves room for waves of invaders to have killed off all the men and raped the women (which would probably be fair to call genocide). I’d be much more impressed by a Y chromosome connection.