AHC: Maximum number of Romance languages?

water123

water123

OTL, there were large areas of the Roman Empire that could have supported Latin settlement, or developed their own Romance languages, but didn't. This includes broad areas like:

  • England
  • Northumbria/South Scotland/Between the Hadriatic and Antionne walls
  • Vasconia
  • Egypt
  • Anatolia
  • The Levant
  • Mesopotamia
  • Other areas in Europe where Latin was widespread but died out
  • Greece
Your challenge is to have Romance languages spoken in as many of these areas as possible. My take is to perhaps have the WRE be far more prosperous and powerful than the ERE through whatever methods, and then the WRE basically has to go save the ERE, and thus the power of ERE and Hellenophone Rome is crippled, meaning that Latin spreads into the east.
 

stevej713

To make it simpler, just have less large states form in Western Europe. You could have dozens of Romance languages in what is now France and Spain alone.
 

Lalli

Romans manage conquer Germania and Britannia is latinized. That way you should get some Romance languages more. And perhaps you could establish more Roman settlements to Balkans. And no Muslim invasion to North Africa so Afro-Romance language might survive.
 
water123

water123

What about an Egyptian romance? I know that Egypt had many different languages spoken, but perhaps if the WRE takes Egypt, they promote the local Demotic speaking peoples to positions of higher authority, with eventually a Demotic influenced Latin emerging as lingua franca?
 

Brunaburh

Banned
I think you mean "how many non-Romance places can end up speaking Romance?", as others have said, counting Romance languages is like attempting to measure a coastline.

The most obvious is North Africa, specifically Tunisia, which had Romance enclaves into the 12th century. Nearby, Lingua Franca, the Latin-based pidgin spoken by everybody in the Mediterranean, seems to have been very near to creolising (becoming a native language), especially among Algerian Jews. A Barbary state with creolised Lingua Franca as its official language is feasible if we have a timeline where bad things happen to the Dar al-Islam.

Pannonian Romance is another obvious candidate, as are the Romance pockets of the Rhine. The best way to save them is to tie them to an economic niche, as happened with Romanian. Wherever Romanian started (and my bet is, not in Romania), it was linked to a nomadic pastoralist culture which was complementary to the economic niche of nearby Slavic, Greek, Avar and Magyar speakers.
 
Vuu

Vuu

Banned
France and Spain fail to unite, first of all. Balkans less Slavicized. Arabs fail to invade North Africa
 

Lalli

Vuu said:
France and Spain fail to unite, first of all. Balkans less Slavicized. Arabs fail to invade North Africa
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Not sure if this works. Speciality in OTL Spain is already spoken several local languages and dialects so there wouldn't be much more Romance languages as in OTL.
 

Daedalus

Depends really on how people end up classifying languages vs dialects. Longer periods of disunity would certainly help so that France, Spain, and even the Caliphate don't consolidate as quickly as they did.

If the Caliphate doesn't take North Africa, we can see African Romance and Nubian/Mauretanian Romance with a heavy Berber influence. In Spain, the areas conquered as al-Andalus would develop their own languages that wouldn't become Mozarabic, nor would the northern languages replace them in a Reconquista. one could see a Baetican language around Granada, a Lusitanian language to the southwest, and a "Valencian" language to the southeast.

In France, if you remove the centralizing power of the king, other dialects might be recognized as their own language if they can establish themselves as their own kingdoms.

Butterfly away the Slavic migrations and you got a remaining Dalmatian/Illyrian Romance language as well as Pannonian. The same can be said about the Germanic migrations into Rhaetia, Noricum, and the Rhine area. As for how they can be avoided, that is more difficult to say- perhaps diverting them towards the Eastern Romans over the West?
 
Cuāuhtemōc

Cuāuhtemōc

Banned
Re: England - You would need post-Roman Britain to not collapse into a bunch of divided kingdoms. You need someone to unify Roman Britain or at least a good chunk of it to have a chance of repelling Germanic incursions. Southeast Britain remains fairly Romanized and maintains a cultural continuity with the other Romance-speaking areas. Another idea is to have the Norman language completely replace Anglo-Saxon, replacing it with an Anglo-Norman dialect.
 

Infinity

Banned
Escape Zeppelin said:
A rough estimate is that there are 44 different Romance languages but part of that is how you count them. A little more drift and a little more generosity in how they're counted and you could probably get that number close to a hundred.
https://visionlinguistica.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/how-many-romance-languages-are-there/
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Is #41, Normand, the last remnant of Normans from England? It's also not clear where the line is drawn in between Norman and middle English from the late 14th century, such as the Centerbury Tales. Nor is it clear why no Norman writings survived.
 
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cmakk1012

Cuāuhtemōc said:
Re: England - You would need post-Roman Britain to not collapse into a bunch of divided kingdoms. You need someone to unify Roman Britain or at least a good chunk of it to have a chance of repelling Germanic incursions. Southeast Britain remains fairly Romanized and maintains a cultural continuity with the other Romance-speaking areas. Another idea is to have the Norman language completely replace Anglo-Saxon, replacing it with an Anglo-Norman dialect.
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I dunno, other people on here have said before that British Romance was never very popular to begin with. You’d probably end up with a Brittonic language with more Latin loan words than IOTL unless there was an influx of Romance speakers
 
The Professor

The Professor

No
Infinity said:
Is #41, Normand, the last remnant of Normans from England? It's also not clear where the line is drawn in terms of time period between Norman and middle English (which is not a romance language) from the late 14th century, such as the Centerbury Tales. Nor is it clear why no Norman writings survived.
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Normand is the Romance language spoken in Normandy that is related to standard French. Middle English isn't considered a descendant of Anglo-Norman which was the variety of Norman spoken by the Norman nobility in England but rather the descendant of Late Old English heavily influenced by it.
The rarity of pure Norman writings is entirely due to the influence of Ecclesiastical Latin and Court French, modern Normand is essentially descendant from peasant Norman.
 

Infinity

Banned
The Professor said:
No

Normand is the Romance language spoken in Normandy that is related to standard French. Middle English isn't considered a descendant of Anglo-Norman which was the variety of Norman spoken by the Norman nobility in England but rather the descendant of Late Old English heavily influenced by it.
The rarity of pure Norman writings is entirely due to the influence of Ecclesiastical Latin and Court French, modern Normand is essentially descendant from peasant Norman.
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The Normans in England came from Normandy. They were around for centuries. They had a presence in Italy and the crusades. What's not clear is what military power replaced them. How could such a military power have completely wiped out Norman linguistic influence? Whatever this military power was, they're certainly not as famous as the Vikings (of which the Normans were successors) or the Anglo-saxons. The later tends to receive more credit at least in terms of descent.
 
The Professor

The Professor

Infinity said:
The Normans in England came from Normandy. They were around for centuries.
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Yes, and their language became known as Anglo-Norman, the Norman as spoken by Normans in England.

Infinity said:
They had a presence in Italy and the crusades.
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Yes.

Infinity said:
What's not clear is what military power replaced them. How could such a military power have completely wiped out Norman linguistic influence?
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They replaced themselves as more and more of them came from nonNorman backgrounds.
Infinity said:
Whatever this military power was, they're certainly not as famous as the Vikings (of which the Normans were successors) or the Anglo-saxons. The later tends to receive more credit at least in terms of descent.
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You're working under a misapprehension. Military power isn't needed to replace languages. It's all about prestige and other benefits.
Note how in England Anglo-Norman was replaced by Angevin French under the Plantagenets before being replaced by English as the French speaking nobility were by rising native nobles and themselves learnt English to communicate effectively with local merchants etc.
 

Brunaburh

Banned
Infinity said:
The Normans in England came from Normandy. They were around for centuries. They had a presence in Italy and the crusades. What's not clear is what military power replaced them. How could such a military power have completely wiped out Norman linguistic influence? Whatever this military power was, they're certainly not as famous as the Vikings (of which the Normans were successors) or the Anglo-saxons. The later tends to receive more credit at least in terms of descent.
Click to expand...

Not sure what you mean by this. We know exactly what happened to the Normans everywhere they went, and they left considerable linguistic influence in various places, less influence in others.

The Normans in England were actually only part of the French aristocratic component of English society. They maintained their language in a way, though many of its Norman features were levelled away due to the fact the most prestigious variety was that of Ile de France, and the Normans blended with other Francophone groups in England. We can differentiate between early loans in English that come from Norman, and later ones that come from the French koine dialect we confusingly call Anglo-Norman. Sometimes we see the same word borrowed in both forms, for example, warranty (Norman) and guarantee (Anglo-Norman French). The aristocracy of England didn't cease to produce native speakers of French until the 15th century, although their French was, by that time, very strongly influenced by English.

The Normans in Italy had a lesser lexical influence on their host community, as they were proportionally a smaller part of the population. However, loans are documented in Southern Italian dialects, and Norman French was influential in the strange formation of Sicilian.

The Normans in Ireland left lots of linguistic traces on Irish and Yola, though they probably stopped speaking their language natively earlier than in England. They became the "Old English" and would be the dominant political force in the country until late Tudor times.
 
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