AHC: most influential Latin

[Otto Kretschmer]

How much influence could Latin gain reasonably with a PoD around 800-1300?


It was the language of Europe but started to be replaced by vernaculars beginning in 1300s on Italy

Can we see a scenario in which Latin actually replaces the spoken languages or influences them to a much higher degree than OTL?

 

[Victoria]

It would need an earlier POD. By the year 800, the Latin that was spoken by priests and used in books and administrative documents wouldn't have been understood by the common people. The various French, Spanish and Italian dialects had already started to be spoken. If you want a more influential Latin, you'll need a stronger Roman empire that doesn't fall.

 

[Nivek]

How much influence could Latin gain reasonably with a PoD around 800-1300?


It was the language of Europe but started to be replaced by vernaculars beginning in 1300s on Italy

Can we see a scenario in which Latin actually replaces the spoken languages or influences them to a much higher degree than OTL?

As Victoria says, unironically, screw the franks and buff the Italian peninsula in the meantime, like Lombards adopt Latin en masse and franks got screwed fighting Muslims meaning Latin is used if they Christianized the germans them

Another would be Muslim adopting latin as secondary language but that means they need to obtain more latin speaking areas and texts too

 

[Otto Kretschmer]

You can create a different scenario in which Latin simply remains the lingua Franca of Europe for longer and influence the spoken language to higher degree

 

[Nikoloz]

OTL is already a Latin-wank, essentially. To make it even more so, perhaps one could butterfly away the emergence of literature in Romance. One can imagine an 'Arabic' scenario, where the spoken vernaculars are rarely if ever actually written, and some form of Latin (perhaps with the noun cases eventually dropped) is used instead for writing and all formal purposes.