What if the Romans hadn't spoken Latin?

There is an intriguing alternative to an *Etruscan language family in this scenario. Were an Etruscan-speaking upper class to create a *Roman Empire, they might actually find using an indoeuropean Lingua Franca was to their advantage. After all, they were surrounded on all sides by indoeuropean speakers, who shared recognisably similar languages (Italic, Celtic, Greek, Dacian and probably celtiberian and Lusitanian). Maybe their *Vulgar Latin would be based not on Etruscan, but on a pidgin of Oscan or Sabine.
The Etruscan language had already absorbed a lot of Italic (probably Umbrian) words and was in the process of shifting from an agglutinative language to an inflected one. Vulgar Etruscan could be a mixed language of Etruscan and Umbrian with a core Etruscan vocabulary and grammar but with a lot of Umbrian and Greek words making up the majority.
 
Modern English would be a whole lot different as it would not have the words which came from Latin, either directly or through medieval French.
 

Deleted member 5719

I think Greek is more likely, lots of cities in the West spoke Greek before the Romans, and it was often used lingua franca.

It certainly had some currency as a lingua franca in the Western Med, but I wonder how much use it was amongst the Gauls. It's probable that Gauls round Marseille would at least be familiar with Greek, but I'm not sure about anywhere else.
 
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