No, I Was Still Not Wrong About This

Q

Did Latin speaking continue after the Western Roman Empire fell? How much did later Latin speaking missionaries and colonists understand of these older lost Romani Latin dialects?
https://www.quora.com/Did-Latin-speaking-continue-after-the-Western-Roman-Empire-fell-How-much-did-later-Latin-speaking-missionaries-and-colonists-understand-of-these-older-lost-Romani-Latin-dialects/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl-2

Answer requested by

Nick Certeza

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Studied Latin (language) at Lund University

Ascension Day

14.V.2026

First, I don’t think there is any term like “Romani Latin”. Romani means an Indic language that came to Europe in Gipsy Caravans, a fairly Romantic, but not altogether Roman fate of a language (but they did dwell a while in East Rome, Byzantium).

You presumably mean “Romano-Latin” or “Romance Latin”.

Second, the answers are:

• yes, just as English would be spoken in the US, if the US were overthrown, however, the exception is Roman Britain, where only the upper class were really Romanised;
• I don’t know what era you mean by “later” … up to 800 AD, this was the standard way Latin was spoken, but in Gaul, comprehension by foreign priests was limited.
• Between c. 800 and 813, a foreigner was hired to teach people in Tours to speak Latin properly. Blessed Alcuin succeeded in making the Latin of the clerks comprehensible to English or Italian visitors …
• … but as a side effect, he made it incomprehensible to the people around there. Hence the decision in 813 (when Alcuin was dead) to not be content with a Gospel reading in Latin, but add a sermon explaining it, in Romance.
• This decision allowed priests to actually study how common people spoke, so as to come really close. Imagine standard English was for some reason rebooted and you suddenly had to speak to people from the Ozarks or to people using Ebonics in their very own way.
• By 880 or 890 they were so good at it, they wrote the first song in Old French, the song of St. Eulalia of Mérida.
• The same process was repeated with c. 200 years’ delay in Spain and in Italy.
• After c. 1100 in Spain or Italy, there was no dialectal Latin left that was represented by written Latin, except perhaps in the country between France and Italy. In whereever Romanian was spoken (Romania or Albania, opinions differ), there was no written Latin left. So, after 1100 or at latest 1200, there was no place left where a speaker of Medieval Ecclesiastic Latin, an Aux-Lang invented accidentally by Alcuin, would have met dialectal Latin and it would still have been written as Latin.