Old English evolved into modern English, Ancient Greek evolved into modern Greek, etc. The ancient Romans spoke Latin so why isn’t the language spoken in Rome today (Italian) called modern Latin?
Because the country’s called Italia, not Latium. Not to mention that while Italian could be considered “modern Latin”, so could French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Provencal, or any of the other Romance languages.
What SMV said. Also, outside the academy we don’t call modern English “modern English”; we just call it English, because it’s what they speak in England. And this doesn’t give rise to confusion, since Old English and Middle English are no longer spoken or used. Whereas Latin surived as a working language, both spoken and written, if not as anybody’s native language, for many centuries. The word “Latin” was used for it, and so wasn’t available for any of the languages that had developed out of it.
The particular dialect of Italian associated with Rome and its environs is Romanesco.
Yeah. If Latin hadn’t been preserved as a liturgical language and a language in which people were expected to read ancient texts, we might call Italian “Modern Latin” - but that isn’t what happened.
Some modern versions of Latin are called Latin: Ladin (South Tyrol) and Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish). So it’s not out of the question for the word to be used for a modern Romance language. And the region around Rome is still called Latium (Lazio in Italian), so it’s not an unreasonable question at all.
And while we’re at it, why is Latin America called Latin America?
Actually, depending on how you count, there are somewhere between 23 and 35 languages that could be considered “modern Latin.” And quite a few of them, in addition to the language we call Italian, occur in Italy.
I know you’re joking, but it’s because three different forms of “modern Latin,” Spanish, Portuguese, (and to a lesser extent) French are prevalent there.
And “Old English” is also called “Anglo-Saxon”, so it’s not like we don’t do it too (use the older ethnonym for the older language).
It’s Charlemagne’s fault.
For centuries language had been changing while the people who spoke it still thought of what they were speaking as Latin. Most people didn’t travel enough to realize that the local versions of “Latin” were no longer intelligible to speakers in other regions. Everyone just assumed they were speaking the same language that the Caesars had spoken.
When Charlemagne became Holy Roman Emperor he promoted scholarship into classical Roman culture and language. So scholars began studying old Roman texts. They established that the Latin that was used in the Roman Empire was not the same “Latin” that was being used in medieval Europe. And they fixed classical Latin vocabulary and grammar in place and put a stop to the ongoing drift of Latin. People now recognized that they were speaking languages that were distinct from Latin. And these local languages continued to evolve while Latin remained unchanged.
Sorry, but just no.
To start with the last point, Latin grammar had been described, discussed, debated, and written about in great detail by the Romans themselves, even by the end of the Roman Republic. It wasn’t set down in Charlemagne’s time.
But Latin vocabulary and grammar was always changing, like that of any language, even in Roman times - which the Romans were well aware of. And it continued to change into medieval times. Medieval Latin and Church Latin are not the same as ‘classical’ (1st century BC - 1st century AD) Latin.
A good example is the Latin translation of the Bible. The Old Testament was first translated into Latin the 1st century BC, but by the 4th century AD that translation had become difficult to understand by ordinary native Latin speakers. This situation was very similar to the difference between the English of the King James Bible and modern English. So the Pope commissioned a new translation into the ordinary spoken Latin of the 4th century - the Editio Vulgata, or People’s Edition, (known today as the Vulgate) which became the standard Latin Bible from that time on. But the Latin of the Vulgate is not that of Caesar or Cicero or Livy or Virgil.
Before Charlemagne’s time, people were well aware of the difference between contemporary spoken Latin-derived languages and ‘real’ Latin, used in church services and in written documents. Nobody thought they were speaking classical Latin.
Charlemagne certainly promoted classical learning and language. But the Latin language was still by no means fixed, and various flavours of medieval Latin continued to develop.
Little Nemo is correct. The crucial development was to standardize Classical Latin as the language of scholarly writing as well as the Church. When Charlemagne came along, nobody except a few monks knew how to read and write. Even though Big Chuck himself was illiterate, he had the nous to bring Alcuin over from England and set up an educational system, which developed Medieval Latin for book-learning.
Once book-Latin was instituted, that decoupled it from vernacular “Latin” a.k.a. rustica romana lingua, and set the two on diverging tracks of evolution. Because Big Chuck instituted Latin reform, preachers began using book-Latin in sermons, so the parishoners couldn’t understand anything. Then the bishops at the Council of Tours in 813 decided that sermons had to be preached in rustica romana lingua. That sets the date 813 for the birth of the Romance languages as languages in and of themselves.
No, the situation in Charlemagne’s own kingdom may have been pretty dire, but that was certainly not the case elsewhere.
Ask yourself why Alcuin had to be brought in… from England. It was because classical learning was in excellent shape in England, but not in the Kingdom of the Franks.
Alcuin came from York and
From the wiki on Charlemagne:
The council of Tours in 813 was a national council, dealing only with Church matters in the Kingdom of the Franks, not elsewhere.
It set out the first formal distinction between Latin and early French, but that had nothing to do with the situation elsewhere in Europe.
I’m not sure if I get why Hilarity N. Suze may have been joking, but that’s a question I’ve wondered about often, what South American countries had to do with Latin. I always thought about it at times when I didn’t have internet access, and then had forgotten about it by the time I did.
Thanks for putting it to rest for me 
The better question would be why Classic Italian was called “Latin”. There was a Latin People that formed a part of the Roman nation, but they were a fairly small part, and I don’t think they were even the dominant influence on the Latin language.
Isn’t “There was a Latin People that formed a part of the Roman nation” sort of backwards? The people of the city of Rome were part of the tribe known as the Latins. (Thus, Rome:the Latins::Athens/Sparta/Corinth:the Greeks [Hellenes]; Romans–that is, the people of that small city-state–spoke Latin just as Athenians or Spartans or Corinthians spoke Greek.) The Latins were in turn one branch of a larger group of Indo-European speakers known as the Italic* peoples. Rome, initially just a backwater town no one had ever heard of, united first its fellow Latin-speakers, then all of Italy (both the Italic peoples and various other groups living on the peninsula)**, and eventually a huge empire that stretched from Britain to Egypt.
*No, not the Italic peoples.
**To somewhat oversimplify a complex process.
I believe the Latins were more than just a part of the Roman state. They founded the Roman state. The earliest Romans were Latins.
The Latini, or Latin tribes, settled in an area called Latium, and the language they spoke was simply called the Latin language.
The Latins founded Rome and were the dominant influence there for many centuries, while Rome gradually came to control more of central Italy, and then later other areas. The language of Rome was Latin, and continued to be called Latin.
See this video, which shows Roman territory over time.
The initial growth of Rome was extremely slow. The video even skips 753BC - 500BC, because Roman territory was just the tiny area around the city of Rome for 250 years. Even later, growth was slow for centuries, and there were many semi-independent client states in Italy.
I always understood that the roots of today’s Romance languages were already growing in Roman times, with vulgar Latin diverging from Classical Latin already by that time, and there being some regional differences already.
Fast forward several hundred years, and the people in Spain, France, Italy, Romania, etc… are all speaking evolved versions of vulgar Latin in their daily lives, which eventually became Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian, while Classical Latin ended up being a relatively static thing, as nobody actually spoke it save maybe some ecclesiastical communities.
Another way to look at it would be that if something cataclysmic happened in the modern world that removed mass communication, you’d have “Classical English” as the formal version used to write, but variants like AAVE and the various regional and national versions of English would continue to diverge from it and each other, so that in 2000 years, they’d effectively be their own languages, all related back to “Classical English”.
So in say… 200 AD, it’s entirely possible that Spaniards, Romano-British, Italians and French sounded as far or further apart from each other than Australians, Scots, Texans and South Africans do today, but were all linked by “Classical Latin” in an administrative and literary sense.
I thought he was joking because I assumed it was common knowledge, but I guess not. Vice President Dan Quayle was the butt of a famous joke that claimed that he said: