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

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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?
It'd beat English by a good margin in terms of native speakers. However, for this scenario lets regard the Romance languages not a dialects of Latin.

It seems the consensus it that Mandarin is the greatest rival, so do we need for a large part of China to adopt another language or balkanize it?
 

Rex Mundi

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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?

Spanish alone has more native speakers than English and is already second after Mandarin.
 
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.

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.

And if there are powers ruling large collections of Latin speakers, odds are they probably control swaths of north Africa, and possibly the Balkans, Britain, and/or central Europe. If France dominated North and West Africa by the 19th century, a power of combined Italy, Spain, and France would definitely be able to hold former Roman territory in the Maghreb, centuries earlier (and even while there are African Romance speakers). Incidentally, African Romance managed to stick around in parts on north Africa until as late as the 13th century.

So, just for thought, I'm going to add the populations of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Croatia and Albania, because what the heck.

809 millions
32 millions (Morocco)
37 millions (Algeria)
11 millions (tunisia)
6.5 millions (Libya)
4 millions (Croatia)
about 3 millions (Albania)

So that puts it up to about 903 million "native" speakers. I guess it didn't add as many as I thought it would.
 
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.

The "native"/"non-native" definition gets murky in places like sub-Saharan Africa. There, there are tens of millions of people whose entire education was in French, Portuguese or another European language, and so while it may technically the second spoken language they've learned, it's the only language they can fluently read and write in. Convention holds that these aren't "native" to the language but that can be debated.
 
It's simple: Have an important scholar of the early Modern Age to say that the Romance Languages are only dialects of Latin and not languages on their own. It's just a matter of point of view, there's no scientific definition of a language and a dialect whatsoever.

This kind of ideia would hardly survive the absolute kings, but why not? They could always impose their own "variety of Latin" on their subjects without calling it a language. Also, to sustain this kind of nomenclature could be seen as prestigious if we have a strong Roman church and the habitual Classical Civilization fervor.
 
Call Spanish Latin*. Spain colonizes the New World and the Hispanosphere dominates the world like the Anglosphere does IOTL.

*in the same way OTL calls Parisian French, Castilian Spanish, Tuscan Italian, etc. This might be accomplished if, as in Zuvarq's Remnants of Rome, a state survives in Spain with continuity from the Roman Empire.
 
Call Spanish Latin*. Spain colonizes the New World and the Hispanosphere dominates the world like the Anglosphere does IOTL.

*in the same way OTL calls Parisian French, Castilian Spanish, Tuscan Italian, etc. This might be accomplished if, as in Zuvarq's Remnants of Rome, a state survives in Spain with continuity from the Roman Empire.

Spanish is not the most commonly-spoken language though. Mandarin has about twice as many native speakers.
 
Spanish is not the most commonly-spoken language though. Mandarin has about twice as many native speakers.

Spanish + Portuguese + French + Italian + Romanian together wouldn't surpass a billion. However, if we also count the African non-native speakers that use French or Portuguese on a daily basis we would probably get close... or not.
 
In any of the scenarios put forth above, would the language spoken be pronounced the same way as Latin historically? Going from the Mandarin example, the Mandarin spoken today sounds nothing like any of the languages spoken in China during 200 CE, even with the same writing system.
 
In any of the scenarios put forth above, would the language spoken be pronounced the same way as Latin historically? Going from the Mandarin example, the Mandarin spoken today sounds nothing like any of the languages spoken in China during 200 CE, even with the same writing system.
No, but with the examples that aren't just "Call more stuff Latin" we might see more shared words between Roman Latin and the regional variants, and also more overlap between the variants themselves than exists in OTL Romance languages.
 
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.

Well, for the Mandarin issue, you could always have a Ghengis Khan analogue act on his (apocryphal?) desire to turn Northern China into one big pasture.

Having the Mongols be extra vicious genocidal bastards in reducing Northern China might knock down the numbers of native Mandarin speakers. It would definitely backfire horrendously on them if they tried it, but it is a possiblity.
 
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