Greek language in a Re-unified Roman Empire?

Initially, my question was this: How late can the Roman Empire be reunified before Greek becomes the main language of the Empire? Latin held on until around Justinian's day, and Greek was pretty definitively the dominant tongue by Heraclius's reign.

However, the question isn't quite that simple as we'd have to consider two major variables:
- How much of the west gets reconquered.
- How much of the east is retained.

After all, an Empire that is goes no further than Anatolia in the East but has Italy in the West might very well be fairly Latin in nature after a few generations, even if this is after the Heraclian dynasty, even without other areas like Spain or France.

So, with that in mind, what sorts of scenarios could we envision in which Greek is not overly dominant over Latin (in some form) in a Roman Empire of some form or another?

(don't try to be cute and have another language, like Persian or Arabic be the dominant tongue)
 
From what I've read, Latin was hardly never more than the language of the Army and the Administration in Greece, Anatolia, the Levant and Egypt, whilst the urban upper classes in these area spoke Greek, thus making getting rid of the Greek language pretty impossible. Therefor, the question we should ask ourselves is how do we keep Latin to keep dominating its two niches? IMO, in any scenario where the west has been lost and then reconquered, you can't.

While some factors, like properly winning the war in Italy much earlier, winning the peace in Carthage and keeping Constantinople's Latin-speaking Thracian hinterland from being overrun by Slavs would go a long way towards slowing down the trend, I don't think they can reverse it. The money, the power and the major cities are all in the Greek-speaking east - eventually, the army and administration are bound to start speaking Greek as well.
 
From what I've read, Latin was hardly never more than the language of the Army and the Administration in Greece, Anatolia, the Levant and Egypt, whilst the urban upper classes in these area spoke Greek, thus making getting rid of the Greek language pretty impossible. Therefor, the question we should ask ourselves is how do we keep Latin to keep dominating its two niches? IMO, in any scenario where the west has been lost and then reconquered, you can't.

While some factors, like properly winning the war in Italy much earlier, winning the peace in Carthage and keeping Constantinople's Latin-speaking Thracian hinterland from being overrun by Slavs would go a long way towards slowing down the trend, I don't think they can reverse it. The money, the power and the major cities are all in the Greek-speaking east - eventually, the army and administration are bound to start speaking Greek as well.
Ja. What he said.

(Almost) any PoD after the fall of the West is going to result in Greek being the dominant language of the Empire. Latin is still going to be used in the West, but it'll be a bilingual state. Like it was before the West fell.
 
Interestingly, this Greek will certainly end being very different from medieval and rhomaic Greek we had IOTL. It's not a given that imperial administration will switch as radically from Latin to Greek as it did under Heraclius.
It wouldn't surprise me to see Greek having the fate of IOTL Late Latin, forming a continuum of languages rather than an unified sole language.

As the previous posts made clear, the Empire won't use only one language, and in this configuration we may end with a Latin/Greek administrative base in a first time, challenged by a growingly multifaceted Romance and Hellenic continuums.
 
Interestingly, this Greek will certainly end being very different from medieval and rhomaic Greek we had IOTL. It's not a given that imperial administration will switch as radically from Latin to Greek as it did under Heraclius.
It wouldn't surprise me to see Greek having the fate of IOTL Late Latin, forming a continuum of languages rather than an unified sole language.

As the previous posts made clear, the Empire won't use only one language, and in this configuration we may end with a Latin/Greek administrative base in a first time, challenged by a growingly multifaceted Romance and Hellenic continuums.

What would be BTW the name for a group of 'Neogreek' languages, as the Romances to Latin? Hellenistic?
 
Hellenic is actually the official name of the Greek "family" of languages,even though Modern Greek is the only language in it.
I know this is cheating,but we could have Rome re-unified by roman elements in north Africa, Hispania,or Gaul. Say the struggle after the 192 AD. assassination death of Commodus, goes into full collapse mode,and Westerners reunify the empire after decades of civil war and anarchy that would make the Crisis of the Third Century seem tame.
 
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