If Roman Empire remained as a single state in the present

It depends on what part of the Roman Empire survives. If it was apart of the West it would be Latin, if it was a part of the Roman Empire East it would be Greek.
 

Eurofed

Banned
What romance language would be the official language of a modern day roman empire...

There never would be any separate romance languages, only slightly different variants, much like American, British, Canadian, Australian English. The Empire would be bilingual, with Latin and Greek, but otherwise you would not see any more linguistical variance than modern China (which modern Rome would closely resemble). Ah, and since I'm fully persuaded that the assimilation of Germania is a necessary precondition for the long-term success of the Empire (assume the Empire's borders are established on the Vistula-Carpathians-Dniester line, the best possible natural border for the Roman Empire in Europe), there are no Germanic languages, either, apart from Scandinavia and maybe a Norse Rus.
 
There never would be any separate romance languages, only slightly different variants, much like American, British, Canadian, Australian English. The Empire would be bilingual, with Latin and Greek, but otherwise you would not see any more linguistical variance than modern China (which modern Rome would closely resemble). Ah, and since I'm fully persuaded that the assimilation of Germania is a necessary precondition for the long-term success of the Empire (assume the Empire's borders are established on the Vistula-Carpathians-Dniester line, the best possible natural border for the Roman Empire in Europe), there are no Germanic languages, either, apart from Scandinavia and maybe a Norse Rus.

Would modern standard "latin" be based on is it the tuscan or castillan or french or occitan,i heard that occitan is getting more prestige during the time of dante...
 

Eurofed

Banned
Would modern standard "latin" be based on is it the tuscan or castillan or french or occitan,i heard that occitan is getting more prestige during the time of dante...

Well, I assume it would obviously be Rome's standard (the city, that is), and for all practical purposes modern Tuscan AKA Italian standard is close enough to it.
 
There would no doubt be lots of borrowed words, just as there are Indian words in English (bungalow for example)

If one assumes Rome has gone off and created New World colonies etc, then its come into contact with other language groups including Iroquois, Aztec-types, and of course Chinese

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 

Eurofed

Banned
There would no doubt be lots of borrowed words, just as there are Indian words in English (bungalow for example)

If one assumes Rome has gone off and created New World colonies etc, then its come into contact with other language groups including Iroquois, Aztec-types, and of course Chinese

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

Indeed. No doubt you would see many borrowed words from Chinese, Greek, Amerindian, and Indian languages. And in turn you would see many Latin borrowed words in Chinese and Greek.

Here I'm assuming that the long-term success of Rome butterflies China, too, on the "millennial superpower" ongoing success path, which is the by far most likely TL.

India, ITTL, is a wild card, it may or may not be butterflied into lasting unification and being the third superpower, or become a fragmented buffer zone between the two giants, or be partitioned or absorbed by either, most likely Rome; if India gets its own imperial success story, we would see an Hindi imperial lingua franca emerge, and hence a fourth global imperial language.

It is also possible that Roman (or in a much, much less likely case, Norse) colonies in the Americas may break off and follow a USA-like path to be yet another global power, but again the differences between "Eurolatin" and "Atlanticlatin" would be just as marginal as British and American English. Moreover, another theoretical possibility (slightly more likely than a Norse America IMO, but still definitely improbable) is that the Norse manage to create their own empire in European Russia (but it is improbable because it is most likely that a successful Rome would eventually absorb the area) which fails or does not bother to absorb, and this would create another great power with a different Germanic language. Not in the same league as the 2/4 real global powers, although.

It is also possible that some East Asian "minor" civilization (say the Khmer or the Japanese) manage to avoid absorption or vassallage by the Chinese, Romans, and Indians, and pull a Meji to become a sizable medium power in their own weight. But in the un-Balkanized world created by Rome's survival, they would remain lightweights. IMO long-term success of Rome dooms Persia in the long end: sooner or later an empire that can pull on the whole resources of Europe and the Mediterranean manages to crush and absorb one that can rely just on the resources of the Iranian plateau, and controlling the latter is just too precious to control the trade flows to China and India.

Last but not least, I deem the possiblity of an Amerindian Meji really close to ASB. Their technological backwardness vs. Eurasian empires on a Renaissance stage wuld be just as damning as IOTL, they would be relentlessly conquered and absorbed by expanding Eurasian empires even more efficiently than by OTL conflicting European states (even if Rome and China would surely practice assimilation and not genocide, although they would surely find Aztec religion abhorrent and ruthlessly suppress it).
 
Last edited:
There never would be any separate romance languages, only slightly different variants, much like American, British, Canadian, Australian English. The Empire would be bilingual, with Latin and Greek, but otherwise you would not see any more linguistical variance than modern China (which modern Rome would closely resemble).
You've just contradicted yourself: China has a number of mutually unintelligible Sinitic languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Hakka, etc, nothing like the English speaking world. I doubt that the preservation of the Empire would freeze the evolution of the disparate Vulgar Latin dialects into Romance languages. It might very well end up like modern China, or the modern Arab world, with all regions accepting one standard educated variety; but people from Spain to Belgium to Venice to Dacia are not going to be speaking the same vernacular language.
 
Last edited:

Eurofed

Banned
You've just contradicted yourself: China has a number of mutually unintelligible Sinitic languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Hakka, etc, nothing like the English speaking world. I doubt that the preservation of the Empire would freeze the evolution of the disparate Vulgar Latin dialects into Romance languages. It might very well end up like modern China, or the modern Arab world, with all regions accepting one standard educated variety; but people from Spain to Belgium to Venice to Dacia are not going to be speaking the same vernacular language.

The latter is what is I was I referring to. Preservation of the political unity of the Empire would maintain the unity of an educated lingua franca among its elites and educated middle classes throughout the existence of the empire (and with the empire lasting 2,000 years, its culture would develop a committment to unity just as fierce as China's). With industrialization, modern education and mass-media would ensure that the educated standard becomes the speaking and written standard for the masses throughout the Empire. Latin and greek alphabet writing systems ensure that mass education in the same language would be much, much easier to implement than with Chinese ideograms. Dialects would always stay that, vernacular dialects among the lower classes, and be wiped out with industrialization.
 
Last edited:
Top