AHC: Latin triumphant

Ok, a hard nut to crack if not ASB

With a PoD before 1500, change history in such a manner that various vernaculars (whether Romance, Germanic or Slavic) never rise to prominance and Classical Latin (even it's somewhat simplified form of Medieval Latin) remains the sole high language of Europe and later, after the Industrial Revolution, is adopted as a spoken language by the wider masses. Something close to the rise of Hebrew on steroids.
 
After giving it some thought, I realized that this may not be as difficult as I first thought. Latin was only supplanted by French as the most widely used language in literature in the late 1600s, which coincides with the reign of Louis XIV. Without Louis XIV or a strong France, Latin could remain the diplomatic language of choice in Europe. If this situation remains into the 1800s, Latin could easily become a global language by the modern day, being spoken in academia, finance, aviation, etc.
 
If we maintain a sort of universal realm ruling France, Germany and Italy, the official language of said country will have to be Latin. Even just an HRE that maintains rule over most of Italy, will necessitate Latin as an official language.
 
If we maintain a sort of universal realm ruling France, Germany and Italy, the official language of said country will have to be Latin. Even just an HRE that maintains rule over most of Italy, will necessitate Latin as an official language.
By the time of the HRE (or Charlemagne) Classical Latin wasn't really spoken anymore among the common people. But even then the HRE was decentralized and many of its subjects were mostly or de facto independent from the Emperor's Rule. How would a new language be enforced?
 
By the time of the HRE (or Charlemagne) Classical Latin wasn't really spoken anymore among the common people. But even then the HRE was decentralized and many of its subjects were mostly or de facto independent from the Emperor's Rule. How would a new language be enforced?

The poster said that Medieval Latin is permitted.

There is no such thing as defacto independent nor does it matter. All that matters is if there is a hypothesized central authority, where for there exists the outflow of primary power in the region or realm. As long as the Emperor is the strongest persona in the empire and is not actively causing issues to create enemies within his own state (this goes for any monarchy or government) then this scenario works. Latin would/could remain the language of diplomatic, scientific and religious exchanges in an empire that does not embark upon the post-1648 deposition of Imperial territory and power that characterized the Empire. Even a scenario wherein the Papacy appoints a King of Italy and Roman Emperor during the reign of Boniface VIII and permits the Emperor to maintain order in Italy and block the Venetian expansion into Terra Firma, should do leaps and bounds in completing this goal.

There is also no need to enforce anything for this to work. Louis XIV and the French crown did not force others to speak French, they simply were demographically significant and more powerful than their neighbors and possessing of a splendid court. Much of the power came at the expense of the Empire, which was defeated in wars by coalitions, of which France was the heaviest lifter. So, the reason French became a language of exchange so readily, is that the French monarchy had surpassed the Empire in perceived power in the European continent and also, Louis XIV willed the French language to be used instead of the older Latin once in use in French for matters of diplomacy (which fit more into a world dominated by the HRE-Papacy).

Also, the poster, did he mean to say the common people speak Latin or that only the ruling classes use Latin to speak to others of the ruling class across linguistic lines?
 
I meant both.

First in pre industrial era there should develop a courtly and scholarly elite actually speaking Latin. Then after industrislization we should see adoption of Latin by commoners. A similar situation to that in France where before the Revolution less than 10% of the population spoke Standard French, the rest spoke vernaculars that often were not even mutuslly intelligible with It.

So generalny an Universalist Europe in which vernaculars never rose to prominence.
 
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I meant both.

First in pre industrial era there should develop a courtly and scholarly elite actually speaking Latin. Then after industrislization we should see adoption of Latin by commoners. A similar situation to that in France where before the Revolution less than 10% of the population spoke Standard French, the rest spoke vernaculars that often were not even mutuslly intelligible with It.

So generalny an Universalist Europe in which vernaculars never rose to prominence.

Well in the case of French, this is different. 'French' had a prestige and usage across France for centuries prior and all of the nobles in the former kingdom spoke the language. The language of the peasantry is mostly irrelevant for the period after the Papacy issued protocols for multiple language usage in parishes in the early middle ages. Also, the 10% number is somewhat dubious, in that it counts areas that the peasantry did not speak French at all, such as the majority of the southern sections of the country and areas like Brittany never part of the French monarchy. Of course few people spoke French in these areas. The other areas, did speak however 'French' but it was a different sort than that spoke in Paris, but it was still derivatives from the 'Frankish Latin' spoken by the old elites and still spoken by the elites. It is the same language and people who inhabited the region centuries ago, when scholars felt that the area of northern France had been totally Germanized and demographically replaced. As such, there was an existing demographic power and mass afforded to French that permitted it in its quest to dominate Occitan and so forth and across its territorial limits.

Latin by contrast, is a language without any demographic mass to it and since the early days, was understood less as something one spoke at home among family, but as a frame for wider discussion. At the various Merovingian and Carloginian treaties, the common Frankish tongue was used, but Latin fulfilled a role as a 'frame' and as also as the more important literary source for said things. Its power lied in the fact that it was not a common language, both in the mass, in the intellectual spheres and in diplomacy. To sully it further would make it no different from the various forms of Frankish and hence disposable.
 
Ok, a hard nut to crack if not ASB

With a PoD before 1500, change history in such a manner that various vernaculars (whether Romance, Germanic or Slavic) never rise to prominance and Classical Latin (even it's somewhat simplified form of Medieval Latin) remains the sole high language of Europe and later, after the Industrial Revolution, is adopted as a spoken language by the wider masses. Something close to the rise of Hebrew on steroids.

The most plausible route I can see is to keep Latin as the language of scholarship until the rise of mass education, and then have countries teach their children to speak Latin, much as non-Anglophone countries nowadays teach children to speak English. In particularly multicultural areas Latin might be in regular use as a neutral language for communicating with members of other communities, and depending on how common inter-community marriage is you might see a group of mixed-race people arise for whom Latin is their native tongue (since mum and dad couldn't understand each other's vernacular, so they spoke in Latin instead, and that's the language baby picked up). That's probably about as far as you could realistically go: having Latin become the native language of Europe as a whole might be doable, but the only way I can think of is for some sort of horrific mass-deportation scenario which essentially breaks up every sizeable language community and scatters their members throughout the continent, causing everybody to fall back on Latin as the only common language they have with their new neighbours.
 
Hmm... Would having some monarch starting to speak Latin as a fashion (initially at least) help? : )

Maybe, it is just difficult to make it a common language. It can be the L2 for the majority of Europe, especially in the cities, but I cannot see it becoming the common household language. That being said, it being the L2 for most of the Frankish nobility, did have its effect in the creation of French and the development of Old High German. So in a sense, this was already otl.... Even with all of the prestige Latin held among the Frankish nobles, the best it could do, was eventualize the French language, very substantial indeed but not what you request fully.
 
Have Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca not switch to local verbacular, but continue to publish their works in Latin. They were the trendsetters for the use of vernacular in high literature. Then have the renaissance start a fashion to revive classical Latin as a day to day language among the elites, at first in Romance speaking countries and later among the ecclesiastical and temporal nobility and the educated bourgeoisie in other countries as well, the way French did become IOTL.
 
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Ok, a hard nut to crack if not ASB

With a PoD before 1500, change history in such a manner that various vernaculars (whether Romance, Germanic or Slavic) never rise to prominance and Classical Latin (even it's somewhat simplified form of Medieval Latin) remains the sole high language of Europe and later, after the Industrial Revolution, is adopted as a spoken language by the wider masses. Something close to the rise of Hebrew on steroids.
France became a unified nation at the end of the Hundred Years War by building a good artillery park that took the English castles and the half of France they controlled. The rest of Europe built artillery parks in imitation. If the Bourgeois brothers, who built the artillery, had been huge fans of Latin, using it for all their cannon and the means of construction, the gunners of Europe might have imitated them. Ultima Ratio Regnum. In itself insufficient, but-
If the humanists had been less crazy about Ciceronian Latin? Something plausible and discreditable about Tully's personal life connected to his style is spread by Aretino and widely believed, only so and so's talk like that creep, decent people use Church Latin, tough guys who don't dance and bark like rowdy dogs use Dog Latin. Medieval Latin was a stronger language and stole from everyone like nothing before English.
 
Lol no, western France at most.
The English had western France just before they lost. A king with an army and some castles can hope his vassals hold his castles loyally. A king with an army and some castles and artillery that can take down castles has a unified kingdom.


What's an artillery park?
Bunch of cannon and stuff -https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Artillery+park. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bureau not 'Bourgeois'.
 
Bunch of cannon and stuff -https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Artillery+park. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bureau not 'Bourgeois'.
That's why I said western France, assuming stuff works out VERY well for the French, both politically and militarily, there's a reason why what you're suggesting didn't happen OTL, and having artillery won't change the political situation.

Best Case scenario is France centralizes A LOT earlier.

Also, why would the brothers be fans of Latin?
 
Kings with artillery had a more unified kingdom OTL.

The brothers are fans of Latin to make Latin a stronger language per OP.
 
Kings with artillery had a more unified kingdom OTL.

The brothers are fans of Latin to make Latin a stronger language per OP.
Examples?

And just having artillery doesn't necessarily mean that the Kingdom will be unified, France had artillery,and still centralized reasonably late. And, I don't think eastern France will tolerate centralizing just because the west did it. They'd see it an an infrigement of their rights.

Ok
 
A Pope wanting people to understand the Bible promotes education, in Latin

Might be plausible, but you would need to prevent the rise of Protestantism to get all of (western) Europe on board with Latin. That wouldn't address Orthodox areas of Europe, which IIRC tended to use Greek as a lingua franca.
 
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