Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
There was never an official language of the empire, however, Latin and Greek were the main languages. [16] During the early years of the Roman Empire, educated nobles often relied on their knowledge of Greek to meet societal expectations, and knowledge of Latin was useful for a career in the military, government, or law. [17]
Through the expansion of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language in the Italian Peninsula and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. It has greatly influenced many languages, including English , having contributed many words to the English lexicon , particularly after the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman Conquest .
The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The Romance languages have more than 700 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas , Europe , and Africa , as well as in many smaller regions scattered through the world.
During the Classical period, Roman authors referred to the informal, everyday variety of their own language as sermo plebeius or sermo vulgaris, meaning "common speech". [5] This could simply refer to unadorned speech without the use of rhetoric, or even plain speaking.
To some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire (from the end of the first century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more ...
The Roman people was the body of Roman citizens (Latin: Rōmānī; Ancient Greek: Ῥωμαῖοι Rhōmaîoi) [a] during the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire. This concept underwent considerable changes throughout the long history of the Roman civilisation, as its borders expanded and contracted.
The effects of the Fall of the Western Roman Empire for the Romans who remained in the city or in Italy ranged from bad to devastating, classical Roman education was almost extinct, the upper classes were able to endure and retain their positions in the Ostrogothic kingdom that after all had adopted many of the Roman institutions. Even so, the ...
Roman language may refer to: Latin, the language of Ancient Rome; Romaic, the language of the Byzantine Empire; Languages of the Roman Empire; Romance languages, the languages descended from Latin, including French, Spanish and Italian; Romanesco dialect, the variety of Italian spoken in the area of Rome