WI: A unified Western Romance language?

Is it possible that if the Western Roman Empire would have survived in some political form through the middle-ages (in a form of extended Carolingian rule or surviving Visigothic-Northern African if Arab expansion is butterflied away) the different Romances could have finally converged in a sort of unified (koiné) standard of Neo-Latin?

At least implying Italic and Iberian romances and possibly Oc. Maybe also Northern African romances if the Arabs did not expand.

Could this Western Romance resemble Italian or it could be completely different?
 
Unless under a single empire, and a well centralized one at that, no.

I believe even before the collapse of the Empire the different provinces versions of vulgar Latin were already quite different.
 
Is it possible that if the Western Roman Empire would have survived in some political form through the middle-ages (in a form of extended Carolingian rule or surviving Visigothic-Northern African if Arab expansion is butterflied away) the different Romances could have finally converged in a sort of unified (koiné) standard of Neo-Latin?

Not really those differences in language and dialect had already started with Latin anyway. You would have to make the impossible challenge of getting rid of regional dialects and cultures, into one mono-culture.
 

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You need the Western Roman Empire to survive for this, and even then you'll potentially end up with a situation similar to China and the Sintic languages. By the time of Charlemagne there were already a myriad of various Romance languages (although Latin was still spoken in some places) with varying amounts of mutual intelligibility.

You also need to avoid the breakdown of infrastructure and communication. People need to be more literate.
 
Well, maybe I was not clear with the premise.

I know this is not possible to prevent fragmentation in different Romances due to the social-political circumstances. In fact this had started at the late Empire.

I was thinking about a similar process to make German or Italian to ensemble a standard language out of a lot of (sometimes very different) dialects when the countries were on their way of unification. And it was obviously a different product than original Latin or Old Saxon.

So, we would have a WRE where different Romances are present (possibly with classic Latin still as an official language) but if the WRE survives through the Middle-Ages and gets into the Renaissance with a decent level of unification, then the standardization of a unified Romance language would be possible then?
 
It can work for an official language, but not for the people. If you want that people across the Western Roman Empire to speak the same dialect, you need to install a public education system across the Empire, otherwise, it will eventually split up, and *Latin will exist only de iure, just like IOTL.
 
I was thinking about a similar process to make German or Italian to ensemble a standard language out of a lot of (sometimes very different) dialects when the countries were on their way of unification. And it was obviously a different product than original Latin or Old Saxon.

So, we would have a WRE where different Romances are present (possibly with classic Latin still as an official language) but if the WRE survives through the Middle-Ages and gets into the Renaissance with a decent level of unification, then the standardization of a unified Romance language would be possible then?

No you would have a nationalistic movement and closely related enough cultures for an attempt to be even feasible. There's also the question and how the WRE survives and how does it change.
 
You might pull it off if you can keep all the various areas in the same cultural/political grouping. Have a frankish/Goth empire that conquers the various regions of France Iberia, and Italy. After a generation or two with the new conquerors becoming the nobles they can then break up, as long as no one is conquered by an outside source. we should have a fairly close set of languages, then a little before the era of nationalism, have a napoleon, like character who succeeds. From their the nationalistic periods this new state can draw on the "Gothic/Frankish" traditions. Which ever group comes on top will eventually standardize and teach their version, inevitably bringing the others closer. Best case we simply have various "dialects" in the same vein as the German dialects, or it could be we have dialects in the sense of Arabic "dialects". Even then there is still a good chance of these languages failing to work together. But no matter what the Romance languages will be very different.

Or if we simply want to be cheap about it. Moors keep Iberia, killing Spanish and the Romance variations there. The Franks keep a more Germanic language and it evolves that way. Boom all you have is Italian for the major romance languages. Lazy? yes. fulfills the challenge? also, yes.
 
Well, maybe I was not clear with the premise.

I know this is not possible to prevent fragmentation in different Romances due to the social-political circumstances. In fact this had started at the late Empire.

I was thinking about a similar process to make German or Italian to ensemble a standard language out of a lot of (sometimes very different) dialects when the countries were on their way of unification. And it was obviously a different product than original Latin or Old Saxon.

So, we would have a WRE where different Romances are present (possibly with classic Latin still as an official language) but if the WRE survives through the Middle-Ages and gets into the Renaissance with a decent level of unification, then the standardization of a unified Romance language would be possible then?
I still say no. Just with that level of technology between 400 and 1400, there will definitely be some fragmentation. However, I could see a system in which they are all just considered dialects of Latin.
 
Well, maybe I was not clear with the premise.

I know this is not possible to prevent fragmentation in different Romances due to the social-political circumstances. In fact this had started at the late Empire.

I was thinking about a similar process to make German or Italian to ensemble a standard language out of a lot of (sometimes very different) dialects when the countries were on their way of unification. And it was obviously a different product than original Latin or Old Saxon.

So, we would have a WRE where different Romances are present (possibly with classic Latin still as an official language) but if the WRE survives through the Middle-Ages and gets into the Renaissance with a decent level of unification, then the standardization of a unified Romance language would be possible then?

If the WRE survived, the common language would be Latin. An evolved Latin, but recognizably Latin.

Look at Byzantium. The official language stayed very close to Classical Greek. Heck, even into the 20th century, there was an argument as to whether Greece should use'pure' Greek (katharuevsa??) Or popular Greek (demotiki??)

I cant much imagine why any re-formed Empire would try to create a unified Romance language. If theyre trying to revive the glories of the Roman Empire, theyd use Latin. If the language had evolved too far for that to be practical, why then the widespread dialects would have diverged even further.

Remember, countries like Norway had a whole mess of local dialects, but theyd evolved in similar directions. So creating a new language (well, two of them), was 'easy'.
 
No, it wouldn't. Look at France. Despite their best efforts, there's still Occitan speakers. Look at Spain. Despite their best efforts, there's still Catalan speakers. And so on.

Hell, the Latin spoken across the Empire wasn't even uniform in Augustus' day, and, if you knew where to look, you'd see the beginnings of many of the differences between the eventual Romance languages. Any language spread over such a wide area (as represented in communication time) is going to vary greatly. You have the fact that your local populations are all generally isolated from each other. You have the fact that they're living among original non-Latin populations that spoke very divergent languages originally. You have the fact that the Latin 'colonists' came to the regions at very different points in the history of the evolution of the Latin language itself. There's so many reasons why the language spread out into different forms.

If you want some unified form of Latin to prevail over such a region, you're going to have to give them Telegraphs and steam transportation. Then, *maybe*, you'd have a unified Latin.

Or, just keep the Empire confined to Italy, and you might be able to keep Latin unified fairly easily.
 
No matter what, youre going to get a variety of Latin dialects. This is common for anyone language spread over a wide geographic area. A unified WRE would likely keep a form of standard Latin as the official language and the various vulgarities would be looked down upon, thus limiting their use. It would likely resemble the current situation of the various Chinese and Arabic languages/dialects.
 
SNIP

Or, just keep the Empire confined to Italy, and you might be able to keep Latin unified fairly easily.

You make good points, but this part interests me the most; considering how close Italian is to Latin IOTL (at least, Imperial Latin) compared to the more widely/oft-spoken Romance languages, I wonder if there's a way for Latin in a recognizable, relatively un-mutated form to survive in Italia up until the modern day (i.e. "Italian" = a true modernized Latin, and not a close descendant), with the other ex-Roman European countries continuing with their own Romance languages. Perhaps it'd end up looking sorta like THIS, only with more quirks due to it being a living language prone to even just a little outside influence?
 
I did think of another way for a unified Western Romance Language to happen. Some power, say Spain, conquers all the territory of the WRE, and imposes their language (Castillian, say) on all its subjects. Clearly the peasants won't be speaking it, and probably not even the merchants. But if all official business and all the army speaks that one language, the peasant speech could be considered downgraded to dialects.

Can't really imagine that happening. But....

Pretending that the other languages were mere dialects would work better if the core language of the conqueror was part of the Northern Italian/Provencal/Occitan/Catalan spectrum.
 
Political unity and population mobility are two important factors. In the case of China, the people living at the two ends of the Great Wall keep mutual intelligibility but in the hilly south often each valley has its own dialect that's incomprehensible to people two valleys away.

Unless the Mediterranean trade is very active, keeping the uniformity in Iberia outside of Ebro and Italy outside of Po can be difficult to achieve.
 
Just for orientation, this is the map of my proposed TL's Western Roman Empire based on the merge of the Visigothic Kingdom with the western remnants of the ERE once the Sassanids have crushed it...plus later developments.

The idea is that form of WRE will survive until the Renaissance. So, at some points, Romances would start to replace classical Latin, but would be able to form an Standard Romance? (like Standard Italian IOTL?).

WRE.png
 
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