Challenge: Development of a common language for Europe

Someone mentioned farther up the thread the potential offered by an earlier discovery of printing, which returns me to an earlier WI -- the introduction of the concept of printing in the first century CE from Chinese merchants who follow the Silk Road to Constantinople and/or Rome, reverse Marco Polos, if you like. Or perhaps more likely, the migration through trade of ideogram blocks themselves along the Silk Road, with some enterprising Greek or Roman realizing their potential. The resulting increase in demand for a new print medium would eventually lead to the discovery of paper, probably made first from scrap linen and papyrus in Egypt.
 
Damned Johnny foreigners should all know how to speak the Queens English! She was auntie to most of the blighters, and if they cant speak the language, just shout at the blighters, they will understand then!

Didn't get the Empire by learning to speak bally Germanese did we?

Hated Latin and Greek though, the masters at the old school were worse than me old seargeant major was with the damned Fuzzy Wuzzies. Fond memories of the old Matron though!

What? --- The mem Sahib is calling me, got to go, can't resist her dulcet tones you know, English through and through - fine family she comes from too - you might have heard of the Dornburg-Battenhausens by any chance? Comming butterfly!!!
 
Even with a longer lasting Rome, dialectization is unavoidable without modern media (radio, TV). The best situation would be a diglossia with the learned people speaking classical Latin and everyone speaking their own dialects at home.

Tell that to the French, who survived long enough until mass media to nearly destroy everything but Parisian French.
 

Eurofed

Banned
Tell that to the French, who survived long enough until mass media to nearly destroy everything but Parisian French.

Which is pretty much the only reasonable expectation if Pan-European Rome survives long enough to develop public education and mass media. Heck, as it stands, our Rome was pretty much efficient to entrench its linguistic imprint in continental Western Europe and Romania. Multiply it for an extra couple millennium of political and cultural unity (possibly only temporarily interrupted by Chinese-like dynastic cycles, but with ironclad committment of its culture to political unity only steadily growing each century) and the whole manpool of continental Germanics being subject to radical Latinization, too.
 
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