Latin An Actual Living Language

Was inspired by a recent visit to the Roman baths in (surprise) Bath...

What would be the best POD to have Latin, in some form or another, survive until the present day? I know that it's still active in academic circles and the like, but what I'm specifically looking for is it to be used, preferably, as an active first or second language.

What affect would this have on the world?
 
Well, as I understand it the only way Latin could have survived to the present day as a spoken language is if the Roman imperial state also survived.

Latin was the language of administration and official business, so when the state was in control there was at least SOME standardization from the top.

Once the central governemnt collapsed in the west, there was nothing to stop the natural evolution of language in the various regions of the empire. In today's world, mass media and easy inter-regional communication keeps language more-or-less standardized, but in the Roman world distance meant a lot more and only a strong centralized authority could exert enough cohesion to keep the language from splintering into regional variants (which is exactly what happened).
 
Not to put too fine a point on it, Latin has survived until the present day. We just give its various mutually unintelligible dialects different names, like "French" or "Romanian".
 
Well, I suppose a FEW cardinals and similar types probably try their hand at speaking Latin in the Vatican, but I've been there and I can tell you that mostly they just speak Italian.

As for French, Spanish, Italian, etc. If you've studied any Latin (which I have), you'd know that they are now quite distinct. They share a basic root vocabulary and syntactic structure, but there have been numerous sound changes, grammatical modifications/simplifications, and vocabulary additions. I doubt very much whether a Roman (even one from Late Antiquity, and disregarding the obvious vocabulary problems) hearing modern French would have any clue what was being said (at least at first).

Now, getting back to the question posed.... I think it would be great if Latin were the international language of scholarship. As things stand today, we grad students have to learn French, Italian and German (or others like Spanish, Chinese, or Arabic depending on one's field) just to be able to read scholarly works written by the international community. I think it would be a lot easier if some all-powerful authority could just decree that we all had to learn Latin and write our dissertations in that. Even though Latin's a helluva language (but don't even get me STARTED on ancient Greek ;)) it's still preferable to having to learn a host of modern tongues you never plan on speaking!

Of course in a few decades we'll probably have good enough translation software to make all this irrelevant...
 
I don't think you can preserve Classical Latin as a living language without serious ASB intervention or a very weird historical shift. But if you posit a strong surviving literate culture in post-Roman Europe you could limit the drift of the various Romance languages. Arabic held up through similar lengths of time through a strong literary culture that ensured the educated could always read each other's writings, even if the common people spoke a somewhat different language already. If the educated class is broad enough, the prestige and normatiove strength of the 'proper', classical form trickles into everyday speech and keeps it in line.

A very different line would be an early Song-dynasty discovery and colonisation of Europe. After centuries of Sinicisation (with Europe's educated elite reading and writing Chinese and hopeful young men embarking on year-long journeys to the Middle Kingdom to return accredited scholars and go on to stellar civil service careers), a European political awakening rediscovers its roots. Over the course of several liberation wars and vicious ethnic cleansing of the Han, Africans and Muslims living in the country, European states are formed and, in the absence of a unifying language or culture (bar Christianity - some form thereof, at least), the government decides to hold proceedings in Latin. Almost all Europeabn activists already speak the language - it was a badge of belonging, and the Chinese authorities had never been able to find enough competent translators - and it is now a mandatory subject in all schools. Over the course of a generation, Latin becomes the language of 'Europa'.
 
Well, I suppose a FEW cardinals and similar types probably try their hand at speaking Latin in the Vatican, but I've been there and I can tell you that mostly they just speak Italian.

As for French, Spanish, Italian, etc. If you've studied any Latin (which I have), you'd know that they are now quite distinct. They share a basic root vocabulary and syntactic structure, but there have been numerous sound changes, grammatical modifications/simplifications, and vocabulary additions. I doubt very much whether a Roman (even one from Late Antiquity, and disregarding the obvious vocabulary problems) hearing modern French would have any clue what was being said (at least at first).
Is the gap any worse than the one between AngloSaxon and modern English? Or even Classical and Modern Greek?

Admittedly, I suspect that a surviving Regnum Gothorum would maintain enough Latin literacy to slow the dialect shift we saw in OTL after Justinian wrecked the place.

HTG
 
Yep, it certainly has survived.
What you need to do here is not to stop it from developing (nutty and nigh on impossible) but to have the French, Spanish, Italians or whoever to call their language latin.

I don't think latin is too different to its modern versions really all things conisdered. The gap between say English and German for instance is larger. And that's even despite a lot of cross-over between those two.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
What would be the best POD to have Latin, in some form or another, survive until the present day? I know that it's still active in academic circles and the like, but what I'm specifically looking for is it to be used, preferably, as an active first or second language.

What affect would this have on the world?
Someone must kill Dante and nip the growing vernacularization movement in the bud. If the language of religion, scholarship, and literature continues to be Latin, then it will continue to be the standard language of a wide swath of Europe, regardless of what the vernaculars (French, Spanish, Italian, etc) are doing. It's not impossible; look at the Arab world, as Carlton points out.

The affect this would have upon Europe? Low literacy rates, slow growth in technology (as all scholars would first have to master a classical language before consulting their sources), and a wide gap between the haves and the have nots (of knowledge).
 
Top