AHC: No Surviving Romance Languages

robertp6165

It is one of the oddities of history that when the Roman empire fell in the West, in all of the former Roman provinces except one (Britannia), the Latin language of the conquered Roman provincial peoples survived and became dominant over the Germanic languages of their conquerors, leading to the rise of a patchwork of different Latin-based "Romance" languages. Franks in Gaul eventually spoke French; Lombards and Goths in Italy eventually spoke Italian; Visigoths and Suebi in Spain eventually spoke Spanish and Portuguese; and so on.

In Britain, the opposite occurred, with the Latin and Celtic languages of the formerly Roman provincial people being replaced by the Germanic language of their Anglo-Saxon conquerors, English.

Your challenge, should you come to accept it, is, with a POD no earlier than 400 AD, produce a world in which the Romance Language Family is completely extinct. Your scenario cannot involve any of the following...

1) Islamic victory leading to replacement of Romance languages by those of the Islamic conquerors.
2) Use of any of the various steppe nomads (Huns, Avars, Magyars, Mongols, etc., etc.) as a deus ex machina to eliminate Romance populations and allowing replacement by populations speaking other languages).
3) Sassanid victory over the Eastern Roman Empire leading to replacement of Latin by Persian.

The preferred result is to see the Romance languages replaced by a patchwork of primarily Germanic languages (although languages from Slavic, Hunnic, Avar, Bulgar, etc. roots could hold sway in Eastern Europe, as could Greek).
 
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kasumigenx

kasumigenx

robertp6165 said:
It is one of the oddities of history that when the Roman empire fell in the West, in all of the former Roman provinces except one (Britannia), the Latin language of the conquered Roman provincial peoples survived and became dominant over the Germanic languages of their conquerors, leading to the rise of a patchwork of different Latin-based "Romance" languages. Franks in Gaul eventually spoke French; Lombards and Goths in Italy eventually spoke Italian; Visigoths and Suebi in Spain eventually spoke Spanish and Portuguese; and so on.

In Britain, the opposite occurred, with the Latin and Celtic languages of the formerly Roman provincial people being replaced by the Germanic language of their Anglo-Saxon conquerors, English.

Your challenge, should you come to accept it, is, with a POD no later than earlier than 400 AD, produce a world in which the Romance Language Family is completely extinct. Your scenario cannot involve any of the following...

1) Islamic victory leading to replacement of Romance languages by those of the Islamic conquerors.
2) Use of any of the various steppe nomads (Huns, Avars, Magyars, Mongols, etc., etc.) as a deus ex machina to eliminate Romance populations and allowing replacement by populations speaking other languages).
3) Sassanid victory over the Eastern Roman Empire leading to replacement of Latin by Persian.

The preferred result is to see the Romance languages replaced by a patchwork of primarily Germanic languages (although languages from Slavic, Hunnic, Avar, Bulgar, etc. roots could hold sway in Eastern Europe, as could Greek).
Click to expand...

You could stop the merging of the Italic languages into the Latin of the Roman Empire, the POD is prevention of the rise of rome or earlier fall of rome, the Italic languages will remain italic languages and not absorbed to latin and the young romance dialects of the colonies are absorbed.
 

Janprimus

It's not just Britannia, Germania Inferior, Germania Superior, parts of Belgica, Rhaetia, Noricum, Pannonia and Dalmatia if your looking at the Western Roman Empire where the language changed. (Obviously there also were Roman Mauretania and Roman Africa where Romance didn't survive, but I'll admit that I know more about the changes in the European part of the empire.)
 
Errnge

Errnge

Janprimus said:
It's not just Britannia, Germania Inferior, Germania Superior, parts of Belgica, Rhaetia, Noricum, Pannonia and Dalmatia if your looking at the Western Roman Empire where the language changed. (Obviously there also were Roman Mauretania and Roman Africa where Romance didn't survive.)
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and north africa too
 

robertp6165

kasumigenx said:
You could stop the merging of the Italic languages into the Latin of the Roman Empire, the POD is prevention of the rise of rome or earlier fall of rome, the Italic languages will remain italic languages and not absorbed to latin and the young romance dialects of the colonies are absorbed.
Click to expand...

POD no earlier than 400 AD.
 

robertp6165

Janprimus said:
It's not just Britannia, Germania Inferior, Germania Superior, parts of Belgica, Rhaetia, Noricum, Pannonia and Dalmatia if your looking at the Western Roman Empire where the language changed. (Obviously there also were Roman Mauretania and Roman Africa where Romance didn't survive, but I'll admit that I know more about the changes in the European part of the empire.)
Click to expand...

Errnge said:
and north africa too
Click to expand...

That may be true, but is non-responsive to the challenge I've posted. Congratulations on winning your pedantry points. Now, care to actually take up the challenge itself?
 
Turquoise Blue

Turquoise Blue

In fact The Brythonic language is separated from the Gaelic ones by their Latin influence
Example: brachium in Latin breich in Welsh. The Latin influence on the Brythonic languages is so huge that 25 percent of the words are Latin-derived. Compare this to English which have just 3 percent.
 

pompejus

robertp6165 said:
That may be true, but is non-responsive to the challenge I've posted. Congratulations on winning your pedantry points. Now, care to actually take up the challenge itself?
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Personaly I don't think it is pedantic. It touches the core of the problem. Where did Latin make way for other languages? In less developed border brovinces. Where did latin remain the spoken language (although it later changed into the Romance languages), in the more heavily developed and rominized provinces*. Why did the Franks, Longobards, Burgundians, Ostrogoths and visigoths switch to the local language? Because the local population outnumbered the invaders and were a major political, economical, etc power in the settled regions. To change that you need a far larger destruction of the area than OTL happened or a far larger settlement by the germanic (or other) tribes, although I don't think that is possible.




*except the provinces where Greece was the major spoken language, ie the eastern Roman empire.
 

robertp6165

DrTron said:
In fact The Brythonic language is separated from the Gaelic ones by their Latin influence
Example: brachium in Latin breich in Welsh. The Latin influence on the Brythonic languages is so huge that 25 percent of the words are Latin-derived. Compare this to English which have just 3 percent.
Click to expand...

Okay. However, that really has nothing to do with this challenge.
 

ChucK Y

The Romance languages survived because the new Germanic kingdoms basically just imposed a new ruling class onto the Latin-speaking population. The new rulers themselves held Latin in high regard, and over generations the Germanic language speakers were absorbed. For Germanic languages to replace Latin, a large part of the population would have to be displaced, from top to bottom of the society. The Germanic migrations were not large enough to do that in themselves. The lands would need to be emptied to a large extent, whether by death, disease, or expulsion.
 
Cuāuhtemōc

Cuāuhtemōc

Banned
Almost impossible.

Britannia was not really Romanized as was most of the border areas in the Empire, and even then some Romance populations survived until the 9th century. North Africa still had people speaking Punic, a Semitic language, and a lot of those people ended up switching to Arabic during the Islamic conquests.


 

robertp6165

pompejus said:
Personaly I don't think it is pedantic. It touches the core of the problem. Where did Latin make way for other languages? In less developed border brovinces. Where did latin remain the spoken language (although it later changed into the Romance languages), in the more heavily developed and rominized provinces*. Why did the Franks, Longobards, Burgundians, Ostrogoths and visigoths switch to the local language? Because the local population outnumbered the invaders and were a major political, economical, etc power in the settled regions. To change that you need a far larger destruction of the area than OTL happened or a far larger settlement by the germanic (or other) tribes, although I don't think that is possible.
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I think you have it the wrong way around. In Britain, there is a good argument to be made that the reason the Britons lost and the Anglo-Saxons won is because the number of Anglo-Saxon invaders was relatively small and the Britons were numerous enough that they thought they had a good chance to defeat the invaders. Therefore they continued fighting for an extended period of time, leading to their destruction and large-scale expulsion from most of Britain.

Interestingly, what I've read of the the DNA studies into the matter seems to support that supposition. The female (mitochondrial) gene makeup of modern the Englishmen and modern Welsh is quite similar and descended from the pre-historic population of Britain, but the male genetic makeup (Y-chromosomal DNA) is very different, with Englishmen being clearly descended from people who lived in Frisia, northern Germany and the Jutland peninsula, but Welsh being related, again, to the pre-historic population of Britain. The most logical explanation for this is that relatively small numbers of Germanic Anglo-Saxons came in, were resisted by the Britons, and defeated them, in the process killing off or driving away the majority of the male population. The Anglo-Saxons then married into the remaining females to produce the English population we have today. The women and children who were left adapted to the speech of their conquerors, and English triumphed. Obviously this is a highly simplified version of what happened, but essentially a true one.

In Gaul, Italy, and Spain, the invasions were relatively large-scale affairs and as a result the local people didn't resist for an extended time. Instead, they accepted the fact of their new overlords and learned to coexist with them. As a result they remained a majority population and the invaders adapted to their language, rather than the other way around.

In all cases, the native population outnumbered the invaders. The difference seems to be the degree to which they outnumbered them...in Britain, the disparity was greater, leading the locals to fight on after the locals in Gaul, Spain, and Italy surrendered.

So ironically, finding a way to REDUCE the numbers of Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Suebi, etc., might actually encourage the prolonged resistance which would lead to the demise of the Romance language in favor of the Germanic one.
 

Janprimus

Drago said:
Almost impossible.

Britannia was not really Romanized as was most of the border areas in the Empire, and even then some Romance populations survived until the 9th century. North Africa still had people speaking Punic, a Semitic language, and a lot of those people ended up switching to Arabic during the Islamic conquests.


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I agree, but the Germanic elites in the Romanized did use their Germanic language for generations. For instance during the process of 'Romanization' the Frankish elite in the more Romanized areas would send their children to their relatives in the Germanic or Germanized areas for a part of their upbringing. The Frankish elite even during the time Charlemagne spoke or knew Frankish.
 

Janprimus

robertp6165 said:
I think you have it the wrong way around. In Britain, there is a good argument to be made that the reason the Britons lost and the Anglo-Saxons won is because the number of Anglo-Saxon invaders was relatively small and the Britons were numerous enough that they thought they had a good chance to defeat the invaders. Therefore they continued fighting for an extended period of time, leading to their destruction and large-scale expulsion from most of Britain.

Interestingly, what I've read of the the DNA studies into the matter seems to support that supposition. The female (mitochondrial) gene makeup of modern the Englishmen and modern Welsh is quite similar and descended from the pre-historic population of Britain, but the male genetic makeup (Y-chromosomal DNA) is very different, with Englishmen being clearly descended from people who lived in Frisia, northern Germany and the Jutland peninsula, but Welsh being related, again, to the pre-historic population of Britain. The most logical explanation for this is that relatively small numbers of Germanic Anglo-Saxons came in, were resisted by the Britons, and defeated them, in the process killing off or driving away the majority of the male population. The Anglo-Saxons then married into the remaining females to produce the English population we have today. The women and children who were left adapted to the speech of their conquerors, and English triumphed. Obviously this is a highly simplified version of what happened, but essentially a true one.

In Gaul, Italy, and Spain, the invasions were relatively large-scale affairs and as a result the local people didn't resist for an extended time. Instead, they accepted the fact of their new overlords and learned to coexist with them. As a result they remained a majority population and the invaders adapted to their language, rather than the other way around.

In all cases, the native population outnumbered the invaders. The difference seems to be the degree to which they outnumbered them...in Britain, the disparity was greater, leading the locals to fight on after the locals in Gaul, Spain, and Italy surrendered.

So ironically, finding a way to REDUCE the numbers of Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Suebi, etc., might actually encourage the prolonged resistance which would lead to the demise of the Romance language in favor of the Germanic one.
Click to expand...

In all cases the invaders were a minority, but Gaul, Hispania and Italia were much more populous than Britannia. IMHO the greatest difference in most cases except for the Franks is that a whole Germanic tribe moved in at once. The Anglo-Saxons once they established a foothold in Britain could send in or recruit or even the news of possibilities in Britain resulted in newcomers. The Franks were similar in way that they started out expanding from their traditional heartland (in Germany and the Netherlands), which made it easier for them to establish themselves in the border regions Germania Inferior, Germania Superior and parts of Belgica, the more populous parts of Gallia turned out to be more difficult in the long run.

So concluding in most cases, except for the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks it was a one way move, for those latter two it was more like a process.
 
Cuāuhtemōc

Cuāuhtemōc

Banned
Janprimus said:
I agree, but the Germanic elites in the Romanized did use their Germanic language for generations. For instance during the process of 'Romanization' the Frankish elite in the more Romanized areas would send their children to their relatives in the Germanic or Germanized areas for a part of their upbringing. The Frankish elite even during the time Charlemagne spoke or knew Frankish.
Click to expand...

So did the Lombards and the Visigoths.
 

Janprimus

Drago said:

So did the Lombards and the Visigoths.
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As far as I know the Lombards did control some more Germanized areas for a short time, but the Visigoths were settled pretty deep in the Roman Empire.

In contrast the Franks were the majority in the areas bordering the area they conquered from the Empire and they managed to colonize the border areas (Germania Inferior, Germania Superior and Northern Belgica). In any case their was a continuous area stretching from their original heartland to their new territories, both the Visigoths and Lombards didn't have that.
 
The Professor

The Professor

Let's consider the basics here.
In an area containing 2 (or more) languages the degree that one replaces/merges with another depends on several factors:

a) The relative populations and growth of speakers
b) The degree of similarity - i) grammatically ii) vocabulary-wise
c) The realm of usage - i) class/prestige ii) religious iii) economic

The last one essentially means that places can remain bilingual for large periods of time - places formerly under Alexander's empire and successors spoke Greek for centuries afterwards because it was the language of administration.

Languages with a high degree of similarity tend to merge producing new dialects that we place in one language or another depending on the proportions of each or politics e.g. Latin + Gaulish > Gallo-Romance because Gaulish had a high similarity with Latin, whereas Latin only added a larger vocabulary to Brythonic.

The case in Britain of the rapid rise in Germanic speakers is very curious.
It appears that it may be due the facts that:
- the Angle/Saxon/Frisian invaders had a flow of people coming off the continent while the Britons didn't
- the Britons had just suffered a population drop (Justinian's Plague)
- the prestige difference was massive i.e. only AS speakers were tolerated as part of society (unlike the Franks who let their serfs and thralls speak their native languages).


So in order to follow the OP we need to:

1) decrease the Romance speaking proportions
2) increase the replacement language eg Germanic

The best way to do this would be to increase the differences between Latin and Celtic, perhaps increase the Aquitanian etc speakers, retard the growth of the Roman Empire, and give the Germanics/Brythonics/Slavics etc a population boom.
However this isn't possible with a post400AD POD.

Maybe another plague coincident with Justinians but arising in Iberia?
This may reduce the Romance speakers enough relative to nonRomance to allow Punic in Iberia, Germanic in Gaul and North Italy, and perhaps a wider spread of Magyar and Slavic; but I don't see it eliminating Romance altogether - the dialects are just too well spread and entrenched by 400AD.
 
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