AHC WI Literacy Latin only but widespread

Is there any way that Europe could have restricted most writing to Latin but most people learn it. I am kind of guessing some kind of reformist Pope wanting Christians to know the word of God but not in the vernacular.

Any other way?

How big of a difference?

How does that impact on Latin?

Does it prevent or at least weaken nationalism?
 
You would probably need to be very early on that ball (pre-Charlemagne i guess, maybe even pre-west roman collapse or at least not long afterwards), and it would likely only work in where they already speak a heavily romanticized language, as they would still carry some amount of mutual intelligibility, where their differences is initially kept limited to different articulation of different letters and letter combinations. Non-romance languages are simply to distantly different to keep it going, and would likely keep a significant secondary writing system, limiting Latin to written lingua franca, and even then only when corresponding with distant realms

Actually, thinking about it, by the time that the pope is 'globally' relevant as more than the Bishop of Rome I suspect that its to late.

As for what this would result with, I would think that it might give non-romance languaged people a much stronger sense of 'otherness', which in turn might even strengthen their proto-nationalist tendencies,
 
My best guess is that this requires a huge multinational empire - such as a Carolingian empire that holds together.

If people are speaking lots of different languages in the Empire, the language of administration probably stays Latin, and that may well be THE language of communication and learning.

OTL, you had lots of nation-states developing, which will naturally tend to use their own (or at least the ruling class's) vernacular for administration. This gets written languages in vernaculars wide spread, and you need to prevent that for your challenge.

Note that French wasn't recognized as anything other than 'bad Latin' until the Oath of Strassbourg 842 when Charlemagne's empire was divided into a 'French' bit and a 'German' bit (to massively oversimplify).

Keep that empire together, with no 'national' subunits, and Latin stays the only recognized language for longer.

If you also do what the Romans did and the Chinese did, moving officials and army units from one part of the empire to another, then that, too, will push a unified Latin usage. If you are a merchant in Paris, and you need to address an official who was born in Vienna to get your licences to trade, you need to conduct the conversation in Latin.

And so on.

While peasant dialects will develop, they might never get written. Look at Plattdeutsch or Afrikaans which didn't get regularized written forms until long after the languages were developed.
 
No fall of the Roman Empire would help... paper and wooden letter presses could be acquired a few centuries later by stealing Chinese intellectual property :D but until then you definitely need a strong, united Roman Empire. The Roman fad for Greeek paideia would not have faded with Christianisation, had it not been for the economic, social and political collapse, I think, so literacy rates in Latin might have been at least higher than IOTL, and of course writing would be in Latin, the official language of the empire, not in some vulgar spoken variety.

If it falls apart after it has weathered the storms of Germanic, Slavic and Avar invasions, which it still might, then Latin could be to Europe something like Sanskrit is to India: a language many other languages are based on, a ceremonial language, but also one still spoken in the conservative version by a small number of people (only the last of which is not the case for Latin ITTL, but even that only for a century or two).
 
We had a recent ATL question about Austria retaining Serbia in the 1700s.
Austria's administrative language was Latin up through the late 1700s.

An Austria wank could also be a Latin wank. If it gloms up large parts of Eastern Europe and maybe works out some kind of stable long term structure that allows it to keep and even expand its Italian areas, and maybe even add some German ones, with Latin going as the elite language throughout.
 
We had a recent ATL question about Austria retaining Serbia in the 1700s.
Austria's administrative language was Latin up through the late 1700s.

An Austria wank could also be a Latin wank. If it gloms up large parts of Eastern Europe and maybe works out some kind of stable long term structure that allows it to keep and even expand its Italian areas, and maybe even add some German ones, with Latin going as the elite language throughout.

Why would retaining a predominantly Muslim/Orthodox region help the case of retaining Austrian use of Latin in administration? That's just yet more of the empire not having a widespread knowledge of the language of administration but more so because no one is learning it as a part of religious education.
 
The more diverse the population and the larger the empire, the less likely that some kind of german proto-nationalism looks feasible as a unifying principle.
 
The more diverse the population and the larger the empire, the less likely that some kind of german proto-nationalism looks feasible as a unifying principle.

Except this doesn't actually change the actual problem with administration in Latin while that is a dead language. The fact that the vast majority of the population doesn't speak it. Serbia would just make that acute because the population isn't Catholic so even fewer people will understand it.
 
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