WI a surviving African Romance?

A recent post at the always-interesting blog Language Hat linked to a fascinating post by Lameen Souag at his blog Jabal al-Lughat about the relatively late survival of a recognizable Romance language in medieval Tunisia.

in the towns of southern Tunisia, the former Bilad ul-Jarid, Latin was still being spoken well into the 12th century. In his recent book La langue berbère au Maghreb médiéval (p. 313), Mohamed Meouak uncovers a short recorded example of spoken African Latin from between these two periods, which otherwise seems to have escaped notice so far.

The 11th-century Ibadi history of Abu Zakariyya al-Warjlani, he gives a brief biography of the Rustamid governor Abu Ubayda Abd al-Hamid al-Jannawni (d. 826), who lived in the Nafusa Mountains of northwestern Libya. Before assuming his position, this future governor swore an oath:

Bi-llaahi (by God) in Arabic, and bar diyuu in town-language (بالحضرية), and abiikyush in Berber, I shall entrust the Muslims' affairs only to a person who says: "I am only a weak being, I am only a weak being."In al-Shammakhi's later retelling, the languages are named as Arabic, Ajami, and Berber (بلغة العرب وبلغة العجم وبلغة البربر).​

As Mohamed Meouak correctly though hesitantly notes, diyuu must be Deo; he leaves bar uninterpreted, but it is equally clearly Latin per, making the expression an exact translation of Arabic bi-llaahi. The Berber form is probably somewhat miscopied, but seems to include the medieval Berber word for God, Yuc / Yakuc.​

The earliest Romance text is the Old French part of the Oaths of Strasbourg, made in 842 and opening Pro Deo amur... "for the love of God". The Ibadi phrase recorded above curiously echoes this, although it predates it by several decades.​

In the comments, someone shares conlanger Martin Posthumus' creation of an imagined contemporary descendant of North African Romance which he named "Tunisian". His scenario involved a 12th century conquest of much of Tunisia by Normans from Italy, leading eventually to the creation of an independent Tunisian kingdom within the European sphere.

Was this sort of thing possible? What might the consequences of this be? It goes without saying that a Christian Tunisia with a 12th century POD would have huge butterfly effects on the wider world.

Are there other imaginable scenarios? Could we perhaps have a Romance-speaking Tunisia that was still Muslim?
 
Another Tunisia thread?

Excellent

On a serious note, other members of this forum have explained to me that if the Normans took Tunis the dominant language would have become Sicilian just as it did in the formerly Greek-speaking areas of Southern Italy. African Romance would have assimilated, probably leaving behind a bunch of loan words into the local Sicilian dialect, and we would have more information on African Romance than OTL.

If you want an African Romance-speaking state, you probably have to butterfly the Muslim conquest of Tunisia and keep the Exarchate of Africa alive. There probably is a way to establish a Muslim state that speaks the language but I'm not familiar enough with the region to say for sure--a collapse of central power during the Ummayad Caliphate era might pull it off?
 
That conlang is interesting, but not true African Romance, going by all accounts from Antiquity as well as from the attested Vulgar Latin of African settlements. I suspect the speakers of the language would've called themselves either Africans or Romans, rather than Tunisians.

There was another African Romance conlang I encountered, but I think it was archived from a Geocities site. I've tried making my own conlang for African Romance (both Carthage and Mauretania variants), but it's not quite as good, and I don't pretend that it is.

To get a Romance-speaking Muslim state would require a POD before Islam which would probably butterfly Islam to begin with. I'd more expect a Berber or even Punic-speaking (a Semitic language, like Arabic) North African state than an African Romance-speaking state.
 
"Tunisian" strikes me as imaginable as a name if we are going to assume that the polity on the northeasternmost corner of the Maghreb is going to be dominated by the city of Tunis. Algeria is known after Algiers, at least.

Any post-Islamic scenarios for an African Romance probably would involve pretty heavy influence from other Romance languages. The conlang author suggested Sardinian would be Tunisian's closest peer, but Romanian and the Eastern Romance languages might provide another analogy.
 
"Tunisian" strikes me as imaginable as a name if we are going to assume that the polity on the northeasternmost corner of the Maghreb is going to be dominated by the city of Tunis. Algeria is known after Algiers, at least.

Any post-Islamic scenarios for an African Romance probably would involve pretty heavy influence from other Romance languages. The conlang author suggested Sardinian would be Tunisian's closest peer, but Romanian and the Eastern Romance languages might provide another analogy.

Sardinian, like African Romance as noted by Saint Augustine, has five vowels. I believe Late Punic had a similar vowel system, and Berber languages have even simpler systems. So the best guess is for an African Romance language to evolve similarly along these lines. And as Romanian is heavily influenced by Slavic languages, all African Romance languages (a continuum from Tripolitania to Mauretania) will be heavily influenced by Punic and Berber languages. The center of African Romance will be Carthage, but I believe Mauretania will easily evolve into a center of African Romance. The Carthaginian African Romance will be more Punic, the Mauretanian more Berber.

But if we go by that conlang, than I believe it's accurate. It would be more Sardinian than anything. The best example is the Venetian language and its spread in Dalmatian-speaking zones along the Adriatic coast.

Tunis should ideally be a mere suburb of the grand city of Carthage, the greatest rival of Rome.
 
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