AHC:Have Latin be the most #1 spoken language on Earth

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Deleted member 67076

Exactly what it says on the tin. Have Latin be, as of today, the #1 spoken language on the planet. Doesn't matter if Classical, Late or Ecclesiastical, along with any specific dialect.

Bonus points if you get it as a first language
 
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I'm assuming having the Roman Empire survive and much later become an overseas colonial power isn't what you are looking for?
 

Deleted member 67076

Well it would be easier if the Romans had moveable type, actual paper, printing presses, etc.
It would. But the challenge is open ended, so do it however you like. By the way, I never said it had to be the Romans, preserving Latin;)
I'm assuming having the Roman Empire survive and much later become an overseas colonial power isn't what you are looking for?
Its one way, but there are many others:D
 
Probably the best way with a latish PoD is for Roman Catholicism to stay united, while the various nation states with their respective national languages stay small.

So, instead of 80million 'German' speakers, you have Austrian, Bavarian, Swiss, Saxon, Pomeranian, Rheinlandish, Alsatian, etc. speakers.

Similarly, no 'Spanish', but Castillian, Aragonese, Catalan, etc.

Then, Latin stays the language of the educated, and the only decent way to communicate outside yours smallish area.

It stays the language of diplomacy and science, and becomes the international language of learning and education.

Where today iotl you really almost need to be able to at least read English to function in the international science world, and commerce, ittl, its Latin.

While its the mother tongue of no one, well very few, it is spoken by every engineer, scientist and merchant.
 
Probably the best way with a latish PoD is for Roman Catholicism to stay united, while the various nation states with their respective national languages stay small.

So, instead of 80million 'German' speakers, you have Austrian, Bavarian, Swiss, Saxon, Pomeranian, Rheinlandish, Alsatian, etc. speakers.

Similarly, no 'Spanish', but Castillian, Aragonese, Catalan, etc.

Then, Latin stays the language of the educated, and the only decent way to communicate outside yours smallish area.

It stays the language of diplomacy and science, and becomes the international language of learning and education.

Where today iotl you really almost need to be able to at least read English to function in the international science world, and commerce, ittl, its Latin.

While its the mother tongue of no one, well very few, it is spoken by every engineer, scientist and merchant.

But what would you do about languages like English and Russian? It seems with any POD that they are still going to have large numbers of speakers. They don't really have any serious rivals.
 
Not to mention Mandarin, Sanskrit, Arabic, Cantonese, Classic Maya, Classical Quechua, Persian...: This TL certainly cannot occur without a surviving Roman Empire; even then, this still would not solve resolve the Chinese "problem" (especially if the spoken language is standardized earlier with some sort of phonetic writing, an ATL Pinyin or Zhuyin...)

I still think it doable, though, but only if Rome industrializes, which is not too challenging given the right POD(s).
 
Step 1. Printing press invented in late antiquity, after Romans begin using paper (the PoD).

Step 2. Upon the fall of the western Empire, which happens at a similar time to OTL, the Churches largely claim the printing presses. Although in many places the knowledge of how to make them is lost, the ecclesiastic higher ups are not among them, alowing the Church to monopolize the printed word and far outproduce other writers. Knowledge of the presses is closely guarded.

Step 3. Islam is butterflied, but the Arabs do invade the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia. They are less damaging than OTL, and most of them convert to Catholicism, but their invading and carving off significant portions of the ERE and Persia diminishes their dominant power status in the near east, as do those of the Slavs in the Balkans. The Arabs, lacking a common language with which they and their conquered subjects can communicate, and not wanting to ba absorbed by Greek or Persian culture, begin using Latin in an ecclesiastic and diplomatic capacity.

Step 4. Faster and wider dispersion of knowledge favoring the church prevents many major schisms in the church, including the east-west schism and the Reformation.

Step 5. Church bishops begin abusing the printing press around 1,000 A.D., using it to print purely secular texts and sell them for profit. Eventually, one particularly audacious and short sighted Cardinal in Italy sells the design to several different people. Secular printing becomes widespread, but it still is entirely done in Latin, as everyone worthy of being called educated is well versed in Latin.

Step 6. Bombarded by Latin writings, written word fails to develop in the vernacular languages of Europe on account of being choked out by Latin. Greek alone retains a comperable status in Europe, but its range is limited to OTL Greece, Anatolia, Russia (which is more heavily Greek influenced than OTL), and parts of the Balkans. With time, Latin is not only the language of the learned, but the language of cities too, while local dialects are considered rural and undesirable.

Step 7. Much like OTL, Europe evenutally explodes onto the scene as a powerhouse region full of ambitious imperialists. The Americas are conquered more or less as in OTL, to the point where native languages simply aren't viable for practical use. European city culture prevails in the colonies, resulting in colonies where most people speak Latin as a first language. Many African countries, whether colonized or not, begin to adopt Latin out of convenience and because they lack their own written languages. In the parts of Asia that are colonized, Latin becomes the language of commerce, though local languages are not as thuroughly crippled as in other continents, while in the uncolonized parts native languages are retained (partly through isolationism), but still use Latin as the language of diplomacy. By the time nationalism appears, most states are thuroughly Latinized, and only a few extremist regimes attempt to reinstate native languages, and are usually crippled by the attempt to do so.

Final stats: 45% of people speak Latin as a native language, 30% speak it as a secondary language, and another 20% know a few necessary phrases for their careers. The only other languages with noteworthy numbers of native speakers are Greek, Persian, and Chineese, although there are countless local dialects throughout the world.
 
Spoken as a cradle tongue is probably not possible. Written, maybe. As a written language, a language of law and commerce, may go round the Mandarin problem, since Mandarin as a written language is complicated.
 

Deleted member 67076

Awesome suggestion Avitus:D

Spoken as a cradle tongue is probably not possible. Written, maybe. As a written language, a language of law and commerce, may go round the Mandarin problem, since Mandarin as a written language is complicated.
Agreed with going around the Mandarin problem. Not to mention its far easier to learn the Latin alphabet then remember all those characters. In addition, I'd say its more adaptable to foreign words and sounds.
 
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Awesome suggestion Avitus:D


Agreed with going around the Mandarin problem. Not to mention its far easier to learn the Latin alphabet then remember all those characters. In addition, I'd say its more adaptable to foreign words and sounds.
Of course, one could butterfly away that problem with the adoption of a phonetic writing system. And those are just four OTL examples. Besides, at least Putonghua's standard orthography, using either traditional or simplified Hanzi, is basically perfectly regular: One character, one syllable in a morpheme. Contrast that with conventional English spelling, which is highly irregular from any perspective, most especially the phonemic one.
 

Deleted member 67076

Of course, one could butterfly away that problem with the adoption of a phonetic writing system. And those are just four OTL examples. Besides, at least Putonghua's standard orthography, using either traditional or simplified Hanzi, is basically perfectly regular: One character, one syllable in a morpheme. Contrast that with conventional English spelling, which is highly irregular from any perspective, most especially the phonemic one.
Well that's interesting. Was not aware of phonetic writing systems in China. However will that make Chinese easier to learn as compared to Latin? I mean, the most difficult part of Chinese for some is the tones, which most (including Latin) languages lack. I think that might hold the number of Chinese speakers back (people who want to learn it, not native speakers)
 
Well that's interesting. Was not aware of phonetic writing systems in China. However will that make Chinese easier to learn as compared to Latin? I mean, the most difficult part of Chinese for some is the tones, which most (including Latin) languages lack. I think that might hold the number of Chinese speakers back (people who want to learn it, not native speakers)

While Chinese is tricky for its tones, it is much simpler for its lack of grammatical rules. There must be millions of people who are intimidated (including myself) by the complex cases of Latin grammar.

Anyway, that's a moot point. If China, or its descended societies (e.g. Japan, Korea, Chinese-settled colonies, etc) dominate the world, it will be the global lingua franca no matter how hard it is. Likewise for Latin.
 
But what would you do about languages like English and Russian? It seems with any POD that they are still going to have large numbers of speakers. They don't really have any serious rivals.

1) the op just asks that it be the most widely used. If, eg Russian has 100 million native speakers, its easy to get latin more than that.

2) russia: otl much of the aristocracy spoke French, the language of culture and civilization. Ittl, that language might well be Latin.

3) English? The language spoken in southern Britain and their several colonies? Why on earth would it be a world language? Do you really think they could, for instance, keep the scots, various irish, swedes, welsh, norwegians, hansa, bretons, gascons, basques, and the 6 iberian nations out of the new world? ;) heck, everyone knows that if someone from Tir Newydd wants to deal with Normandi Dwest, they use Latin to do so.

4) seriously, the biggest problem is Mandarin. We've to keep southern China from adopting it. 'Hindustani' (otl Urdu and Hindi) could also be split more.
 
I've read previously (I do not remember where) that the Renaissance love of the classics is what actually doomed Latin as a commonly spoke language. They revered the Latin of Cicero and Vergil so much that all variations on spoken Latin were stamped out, effectively stagnating the language. To quote wikipedia, the humanists "corrected medieval Latin out of existence."
 

J.D.Ward

Donor
The Romance Languages

How high does modern Latin stand if you regard all the Romance languages as dialects of modern Latin?

Would it be the world's third-commonest language, after Chinese and English?
 
Not to mention Mandarin, Sanskrit, Arabic, Cantonese, Classic Maya, Classical Quechua, Persian...: This TL certainly cannot occur without a surviving Roman Empire; even then, this still would not solve resolve the Chinese "problem" (especially if the spoken language is standardized earlier with some sort of phonetic writing, an ATL Pinyin or Zhuyin...)

Well, depends on how you define it. Mandarin may have the largest number of native speakers at just shy of 1 billion, but the total number of people fluent in English is something like 1.8 billion.

So if you're satisfied with Latin-is-largest-by-way-of-second-language, then the Chinese won't be a problem as long as they follow basically OTL routes and stick to China. You just need to find a way to export Latin instead of English, which may require a surviving Roman Empire.

Although, the Latin that ends up being spoken likely won't closely resemble the Latin we learn in school or Church. It'll probably actually end up sounding an awful lot like Italian or Spanish, actually, thanks to the proliferation of vulgar dialects.

How high does modern Latin stand if you regard all the Romance languages as dialects of modern Latin?

Hey, that's a good point. If Chinese can do it, why not Latin?

(Heck, I'm pretty sure the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is far larger than the difference between French and Spanish)

Okay, so we've got 406 million native Spanish speakers, 59 million native Italian speakers, 110 million native French speakers, 210 million native Portuguese speakers, and 24 million Romanian speakers as the largest language.

So...809 million native "Latin" speakers, then. Still short of Mandarin. Though, if you count non-native fluent speakers, this number jumps a huge amount and overtakes Mandarin.
 
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How high does modern Latin stand if you regard all the Romance languages as dialects of modern Latin?

Would it be the world's third-commonest language, after Chinese and English?

Probably it beats English for number of native speakers. We are talking about of a good chunk of Europe, all of Latin America and several other places around after all.
However, while technically Italian, French, Portuguese etc. are all dialects of Latin in a sense, you can't really say that modern Romance counts as one language. French in particular is pretty divergent and not mutually intelligible with, for example, Italian (though you can manage a limited degree of mutual intelligibility between Italian and Castilian).
 
While Chinese is tricky for its tones, it is much simpler for its lack of grammatical rules. There must be millions of people who are intimidated (including myself) by the complex cases of Latin grammar.

I am taking Latin at school currently and I can tell you that the Grammar is actually, in My opinon anyway, a lot simpler. all the verbs have the same basic endings, it is just the two or three letters between them that change the tense. the problem is memorizing all of the cases, and some of the pronouns.
 
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