I recently read on Wikipedia that in 1st century Palestine Latin was rarely used outside of the Roman army, with Greek being the main language of administration and Aramaic being used by the common people. Is this true? What languages did the Roman Empire use in administration and where? Where was Latin and Greek used in everyday life? And what happened if you couldn’t speak Latin or Greek?
From Wikipedia:
Latin and Greek were the dominant languages of the Roman Empire, but other languages were important regionally. The language of the ancient Romans was Latin, which served as the “language of power”. Latin was pervasive in the Roman Empire as the language of the law courts in the West, and of the military everywhere. After all freeborn inhabitants of the Empire were universally enfranchised in 212 AD, a great number of Roman citizens would have lacked Latin, though they were expected to acquire at least a token knowledge, and Latin remained a marker of “Romanness”.
Koine Greek had become a shared language around the eastern Mediterranean and into Asia Minor as a consequence of the conquests of Alexander the Great. The “linguistic frontier” dividing the Latin West and the Greek East passed through the Balkan peninsula. Educated Romans, particularly those of the ruling elite, studied and often achieved a high degree of fluency in Greek, which was useful for diplomatic communications in the East even beyond the borders of the Empire. The international use of Greek was one condition that enabled the spread of Christianity, as indicated for example by the choice of Greek as the language of the Epistles of Paul and its use for the ecumenical councils of the Christian Roman Empire. With the dissolution of the Empire in the West, Greek became the dominant language of the Eastern Roman Empire, later known as the Byzantine Empire.
One item I read (IIRC from a commentary by a latin teacher) was that by the first century the “street” latin was significantly different from the formal or written latin of the educated elite, it was almost a different language,
Damn kids nowadays, all they do is hang out on the street and speak French, not the Latin we had to learn as kids.
Was this street language the beginning of the Italian language?
In northern Italy, yes. Elsewhere, it was the beginning of the other Romance languages.
In the 1st century? I seriously doubt it. The street language would have been a mix of the various languages spoken in the Empire. Modern Italian didnt take shape until relatively recently,
I took the question to be “was this the origin of Italian,” not “was this already Italian.” Italian certainly began from the colloquial Latin of Italy. It was still Latin, not Italian, and it wasn’t modern Italian for many, many centuries.