On the morning of 11 February 2013, a room full of the world's press missed the biggest religious story of the decade. Pope Benedict XVI, addressing his cardinals in Latin, quietly announced that he would resign — the first pope to do so in nearly six hundred years. Most journalists waited for a translation. Giovanna Chirri, a reporter for the Italian agency ANSA whose Latin was up to the job, understood the words as they were spoken and broke the news to the world. The 'dead' language had just delivered the scoop of a lifetime.
Latin's death certificate has never been signed, because there is nothing to write on it. No generation went to bed speaking Latin and woke up speaking French. What actually happened is slower and stranger. Alongside the polished Classical Latin of Cicero and Virgil there was always Vulgar Latin — the everyday speech of soldiers, traders and farmers — and the two drifted apart for centuries. A famous document known as the Appendix Probi, a pedant's list of corrections along the lines of 'speculum non speclum' ('it's speculum, not speclum'), inadvertently recorded exactly how ordinary Romans really talked. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in AD 476, there was no longer an empire to hold the standard together, and regional speech went its separate ways.
When Latin stopped understanding itself
The drift shows up in the words themselves. Classical Latin's equus (horse) lost out in everyday speech to the slangy caballus — roughly 'nag' — which became the French cheval, the Spanish caballo and the Italian cavallo. Focus, the hearth, warmed up into fuoco, fuego and feu: fire itself. By 813 the gap had grown so wide that the Council of Tours instructed priests to preach in the 'rustic Roman tongue', because congregations could no longer follow sermons in Latin. The paper trail of the daughter languages begins soon after: the Strasbourg Oaths of 842, sworn by Charlemagne's grandsons Louis the German and Charles the Bald, preserve the earliest text in an ancestor of French; Spanish first surfaces in scribbled marginal notes called the Glosas Emilianenses; and Italian's earliest documents are usually taken to be the Placiti Cassinesi, court records from around 960.
Today the Romance family — the name comes from romanice loqui, 'to speak in the Roman way', and originally had nothing to do with love — counts five big national languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, plus a rich supporting cast including Catalan, Galician, Occitan and Romansh, one of Switzerland's four national languages. Sardinian is often described by linguists as the closest living language to Latin, while Romanian, isolated among Slavic-speaking neighbours, kept case endings its western cousins abandoned. Between them, the daughters of Latin are spoken natively by hundreds of millions of people — Spanish by more than any other — which makes 'dead' a curious word for the family firm.
The afterlife
By the textbook definition Latin did die: a dead language is one with no native speakers, and no child has grown up babbling in Latin for many centuries. But few living languages have had such a career. It remained Europe's shared language of scholarship long after Rome fell — Newton published his Principia in Latin in 1687, and Linnaeus built the naming system for all life from Latin and Greek — while law, medicine and mottoes are soaked in it still. Every time a doctor writes 'placebo' or a lawyer says 'alibi', Latin is quietly conjugating away: the first is a Latin verb meaning 'I shall please', the second an adverb meaning 'elsewhere'.
And in one small state, Latin never even retired. The Holy See still issues its most solemn documents in Latin, and the Vatican keeps the language deliberately alive for the modern world. Its lexicographers published the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis in the 1990s, a dictionary rendering some 15,000 modern concepts into Latin — the computer becomes instrumentum computatorium, a flying saucer res inexplicata volans — and Vatican City once boasted a cash machine whose on-screen instructions were in Latin. Benedict XVI founded a Pontifical Academy for Latin in 2012, the papal Twitter account acquired a Latin edition with a surprisingly healthy following, and Finnish public radio broadcast a Latin news bulletin, Nuntii Latini, for three decades from 1989. When the modern world produces a selfie, somebody in Rome will find a way to say it in the language of Cicero.
So the exam answer depends on the question. Did Latin die? As a mother tongue, yes — gradually, imperceptibly, with no date anyone can name. But it never fell silent for a moment. It simply stopped answering to one name and started answering to five. Latin is not a corpse; it is a crowd — and on a February morning in 2013, one reporter who still understood it walked away with the story of the decade.
Quiz nuggets
- ANSA journalist Giovanna Chirri scooped Pope Benedict XVI's 2013 resignation because she understood his Latin announcement as he spoke.
- The Strasbourg Oaths of 842, sworn by Charlemagne's grandsons, contain the earliest known text in an ancestor of French.
- Sardinian is often cited by linguists as the closest living language to Latin.
- The Vatican's Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis renders the computer into Latin as instrumentum computatorium.
- 'Romance' derives from romanice loqui — 'to speak in the Roman way' — not from anything to do with love.