Why Italy
When did Romans switch to Italian? History?
At what point in time did the romans and other peoples living in italy stop speaking latin and switch to italian? the languages are similar, but not very much so... so i assume that italina was introduced to the "italians" from another part of the world? does anybody know?
Public Comments
- It wasn't a single moment when everyone said "hey, lets just start speaking Italian!", it was a transformation over several centuries from Latin to Vulgar Latin, or what we now know as Italian. Over the course of the dark ages, the Educated upkept the traditional Latin vernacular, while the uneducated masses had no reference (as they recieved no education on language) from which to base their language off of, thus vulgar latin gradually transformed into the Italian of today, virtually unrecognizable from its parent language. The widely regarded "benchmark" for Italian was The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri in 1321, the first major book published in Italian instead of Latin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divine_Comedy
- Italy was subject to many barbarian invasions as the Roman Empire collapsed and died. Most of these tribes were Germanic, such as the Ostrogoths and Lombards. Even when Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, it was a precise language that required years of schooling to speak properly. The people spoke a vulgar form of it, with more slang and less attention to complex features like the declension of nouns. This vulgate tongue was influenced by the various dialects of German the invaders spoke, and by about 900 AD people were speaking many variants of Italian. The Italian of today is the Italian of Dante, not the Italian of Naples or Sicily.
- absolutely rocking q. I can only guess that rome was the only thriving and wealthy centre of Italy and all other districts back in the day were rural. Latin was probly lost as a language when saxons and normans came to prominence and the english language began developing. Paris is actually only 1,000 yrs old or maybe less and before then the people spoke a gaelic language and were called gaul. If the vikings had of had a plan and been more organised scandanvians would have covered more of europe but the vikings were simply a sophisticated gang, staunch never the less. All I know is rome got it's military numbers from Italy not just rome.
- There were external factors, but their effects were milds, mostly resulting in some new words. Latin take century to become Italian (and other romance languages). This happened before IX cent. and, probably, began very early when Roman Empire yet existed. Indeed, today Romance languages share many features and mostly are more similar to each other, than to the parent language (Latin)
