What Language Did Romans Speak?

The Romans spoke Latin, a member of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family, and in the eastern provinces they also spoke Greek, which had been the lingua franca of the Mediterranean since the conquests of Alexander the Great. Over time, the everyday speech of ordinary Romans drifted away from the polished language of Cicero and Virgil, eventually giving rise to the Romance languages still spoken today. Latin also outlived the empire itself, surviving in the Roman Catholic liturgy, in European law, and in the scientific vocabulary of the modern world.

The Three Layers of Latin

Latin existed in several distinct registers. Classical Latin, the language of Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid, was a literary and political idiom codified in the first century BCE. It was a deliberate, archaizing style, distinct from what most Romans actually spoke. Beneath it lay Vulgar Latin, the everyday speech of soldiers, merchants, slaves, and provincials, from which the Romance languages would later descend. Finally, Late Latin described the literary Latin of the third through sixth centuries CE, a transitional form that borrowed heavily from Greek and that began to approximate the syntax of the emerging Romance tongues. The line between these layers was never sharp: Cicero complained about his wife’s “vulgarisms,” and the Emperor Tiberius mocked soldiers who dropped their hs.

Greek as the Second Language of Empire

From the moment Rome conquered the Hellenistic kingdoms in the second century BCE, Greek became the second language of the empire. Plutarch reports that Cleopatra could speak with Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes, and Parthians through interpreters, and even to the Egyptians themselves in their own tongue — an unusual accomplishment for a Macedonian-descended Ptolemaic queen — but Greek remained her language with Mark Antony and with the Roman aristocracy. The epigraphic record is striking: in the eastern provinces, public inscriptions are almost always in Greek, while the western half of the empire remained overwhelmingly Latin-speaking. The city of Rome itself had a large Greek-speaking underclass, descendants of slaves captured in the wars against Macedonia and the Seleucid empire. Emperors from Augustus Caesar to Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek as readily as Latin, and the New Testament was composed in koine Greek rather than in the language of Virgil.

A Shared Imperial Vocabulary

Latin and Greek mingled in fascinating ways. Roman soldiers in the east swore by theos kai (“by God”), and a Roman matron might bless her child with a Greek kalo kai agatho (“noble and good”). The famous Res Gestae Divi Augusti, Augustus’s autobiographical inscription, exists in both languages, and the emperor Hadrian preferred Greek for his private correspondence. By the third century, the imperial chancery employed Greek-speaking secretaries in the east and Latin-speaking ones in the west, and Constantine’s decision to relocate the capital to Byzantium in 330 CE would tip the balance decisively toward Greek in the surviving Eastern Roman Empire.

How Latin Spread Across the West

Latin spread through the western provinces by three overlapping means: military colonization, administrative routine, and everyday commerce. Legionaries stationed in Gaul, Hispania, and North Africa married local women and settled on land grants after their discharge, founding market towns that became centers of Latinization. The tax system, the courts, and the schools all operated in Latin, and ambitious provincials learned it to gain citizenship. By the time of Julius Caesar, Rome had extended citizenship to many of its Italian allies, and in 212 CE the Constitutio Antoniniana of Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to nearly every free inhabitant of the empire.

The Birth of the Romance Languages

As the Western Empire dissolved in the fifth and sixth centuries, the spoken Latin of the provinces began to fragment along regional lines. Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and Occitan are all direct descendants of Vulgar Latin, sharing roughly 70 to 80 percent of their basic vocabulary with the speech of Cicero. Words like aqua (water, eau, acqua), bonus (good, bueno, bon), and camera (room, chambre, camera) survive almost unchanged from Roman times. The military frontier at the Rhine, the Pyrenees, and the Danube shaped where Latin displaced Celtic, Basque, and Thracian speech, and the new Germanic kingdoms actually accelerated the divergence by interrupting overland travel.

The Survival of Latin in the Church

While the spoken language fragmented, the written Latin of the church remained remarkably stable. The Vulgate Bible, translated by Saint Jerome in the late fourth century, became the standard liturgical text of Western Christianity, and it shaped the vocabulary of Latin Christendom for a thousand years. Medieval monks read Augustine and Gregory the Great, and Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus, Thomas More, and Petrarch consciously imitated the prose of Cicero and Caesar. The Catholic Church still conducts some of its ceremonies in Latin, and the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria are nearly two thousand years old.

Latin in Law, Science, and the Modern World

Latin never died in the worlds of law, science, and education. Roman law, codified under Justinian in the sixth century, was rediscovered in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and became the basis of the civil-law systems of continental Europe. Phrases like habeas corpus, pro bono, ad hoc, and ex post facto are still in daily legal use. Botanists name new species in Latin; anatomists label the parts of the human body in Latin; and the Catholic Church, the Vatican, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences still publish in the language. The Latin alphabet, with the addition of J, U, and W, became the alphabet of English, French, Spanish, German, and most other Western languages, and Roman numerals are still used on clocks, monuments, and the Super Bowl.

A Language That Outlived Its Empire

Latin is one of the longest-lived languages in human history, used continuously as a literary, religious, legal, and scientific medium for more than two thousand years. Its descendants are spoken by more than 900 million people as a first language and serve as a second language for hundreds of millions more. The empire that gave it imperial reach is long gone, but the language of its legions, its consuls, and its poets lives on in every Romance tongue, in the prayers of the Latin Church, and in the technical vocabulary of the modern world.

What scholars still debate

When spoken Latin gave way to the Romance languages, and whether the transition was sudden or gradual, is the central question of Romance linguistics. Roger Wright (Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and their Companions, 1982) argued for a dramatic shift only after the collapse of Roman literacy in the early Middle Ages, while the more conventional view holds for a long, centuries-long divergence visible in inscriptions from the third century onward. James Clackson and Geoffrey Horrocks (The Blackwell History of the Latin Language, 2007) trace the development more conservatively. The relationship between Vulgar Latin and the koinē Greek of the eastern provinces — and the persistent bilingualism of the imperial elite, well documented in the Res Gestae of Augustus — is another live area of research, with Michael Crawford and others emphasizing how long the two languages lived side by side.