Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What language was spoken by the Roman Empire?
Latin and Greek were the official languages of the Roman Empire, but other languages were important regionally. Latin was the original language of the Romans and remained the language of imperial administration, legislation, and the military throughout the classical period.[2] In the West it became the lingua franca and came to be used for even local administration of the cities including the law courts.[3][4] After all freeborn inhabitants of the Empire were universally enfranchised in 212 AD, a great number of Roman citizens would have lacked Latin, though they were expected to acquire at least a token knowledge, and Latin remained a marker of "Romanness".[5]
Like all Romance languages, the Iberian Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin. Vulgar Latin was the nonstandard (in contrast to Classical Latin) form of the Latin language spoken by soldiers and merchants throughout the Roman Empire. With the expansion of the empire, Vulgar Latin came to be spoken by inhabitants of the various Roman-controlled territories. Latin and its descendants have been spoken in Iberia since the Punic Wars, when the Romans conquered the territory (see Roman conquest of Hispania).
The Latin alphabet spread from Italy, along with the Latin language, to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Roman Empire, including Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half of the Empire, and as the western Romance languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan, evolved out of Latin they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet.
It is generally considered that sometime between 800 and 1,200 years ago, Vulgar Latin spoken in the Balkan provinces of the Roman Empire, which is also known as Proto-Eastern Romance, broke up into four languages: Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian. One possibility for the origin of Aromanian is that in the same way standard Romanian is believed to be descended from the Latin spoken by the Getae (Dacians ["Daco-Thracians"] and Roman settlers in what is now Romania), Aromanian descended from the Latin spoken by Thracian and Illyrian peoples living in the southern Balkans (Epirus, Macedonia and Thrace).
Surviving Latin literature consists almost entirely of Classical Latin in its broadest definition. It includes a polished and sometimes highly stylized literary language sometimes termed Golden Latin, which spans the 1st century BC and the early years of the 1st century AD. However, throughout the history of ancient Rome the spoken language differed in both grammar and vocabulary from that of literature, and is referred to as Vulgar Latin. In addition to Latin, the Greek language was often spoken by the well-educated elite, who studied it in school and acquired Greek tutors from among the influx of enslaved educated Greek prisoners of war, captured during the Roman conquest of Greece. In the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which became the Byzantine Empire, the Greek Koine of Hellenism remained current and was never replaced by Latin. It continued to influence the Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Eastern Romance languages.
The official language of the empire was Quechua, although dozens if not hundreds of local languages were spoken. The Amautas did ensure that the general population learn Quechua as the language of the Empire, much in the same way the Romans promoted Latin throughout Europe; however, this was done more for political reasons than educational ones.
Greek had been in use in the southern part of the Balkans since the late 4th century BC, as a result of the Macedonian conquests of Philip and Alexander. The ancient Macedonian language, perhaps a Greek dialect,[146] may have been spoken in some parts of what is now Macedonia and northern Greece; to the north of this area, Paeonian would have been used, and to the south Epirot, both scantily attested.[147]
The Romance languages bear testimony to the role of Latin as the "lingua franca" of the Roman Empire; for example, Italian has always been important in the Mediterranean region, and nowadays it is the most-spoken language among members of the Roman catholic hierarchy and it is also used in music (especially Opera) and the fashion industry. Turkish was similarly important as the primary language of the Ottoman Empire. Koine Greek was the "world language" of the Hellenistic period, but its distribution is not reflected in the distribution of Modern Greek due to the linguistic impact of the Slavic, Arabic and Turkic expansions. The distribution of the Arabic and Turkic languages, in turn, are a legacy of the Caliphates and the Turkic Khaganate, respectively.
Gaulish or Gallic is the name given to the Celtic language that was spoken in Gaul before the Latin of the late Roman Empire became dominant in Roman Gaul. According to Julius Caesar in his "Commentaries on the Gallic War", it was one of three languages in Gaul, the others being Aquitanian and Belgic. In Gallia Transalpina, a Roman province by the time of Caesar, Latin was the language spoken since at least the previous century. Gaulish is paraphyletically grouped with Celtiberian, Lepontic, and Galatian as Continental Celtic. The Lepontic language and the Galatian language are sometimes considered to be dialects of Gaulish. 
Because of the difficulty of imposing boundaries on a continuum, various counts of the modern Romance languages are given; for example, Dalby lists 23 based on mutual intelligibility. The following, more extensive list, includes 35 current, living languages, and one recently extinct language, Dalmatian:Romance languages are the continuation of Vulgar Latin, the popular and colloquial sociolect of Latin spoken by soldiers, settlers, and merchants of the Roman Empire, as distinguished from the classical form of the language spoken by the Roman upper classes, the form in which the language was generally written. Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language in continental Western Europe. Latin also exerted a strong influence in southeastern Britain, the Roman province of Africa, western Germany, Pannonia and the whole Balkans.
Apart from the Imperial court, administration and military, the primary language used in the eastern Roman provinces even before the decline of the Western Empire was Greek, having been spoken in the region for centuries before Latin.[251] Following Rome's conquest of the east its 'Pax Romana', inclusionist political practices and development of public infrastructure, facilitated the further spreading and entrenchment of Greek language in the east. Indeed, early on in the life of the Roman Empire, Greek had become the common language of the Church, the language of scholarship and the arts, and to a large degree the lingua franca for trade between provinces and with other nations.[252] Greek for a time became diglossic with the spoken language, known as Koine (eventually evolving into Demotic Greek), used alongside an older written form (Attic Greek) until Koine won out as the spoken and written standard.[253]
Since the foundation of the Ptolemaic kingdom in Alexandria, Egypt had been under the influence of Greek culture, and later fell under the control of the Persian Empire and Roman Empire. Eventually it was conquered from the Eastern Romans by the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate in the 7th century CE. The Coptic language, which was written using the Coptic variant of the Greek alphabet, was spoken in Egypt before the Islamic conquest. As a result of Egypt's cultural Arabization, the adopted Arabic language began to serve as a lingua franca. The Egyptian Arabic dialect has retained a number of Coptic words, and the grammar takes some influence from Coptic, as well. Currently the Ancient Coptic language only survives as a liturgical language of the Coptic Church and is fluently spoken by many Egyptian priests.
The Roman province of Africa was organized in 146 BC following the defeat of Carthage in the Third Punic War. Carthage, destroyed following the war, was rebuilt in the dictatorship of Julius Caesar as a Roman colony. In the time of the Roman Empire, the province had become populous and prosperous, and Carthage was the second-largest Latin-speaking city in the Empire. Latin was, however, largely an urban and coastal speech; Carthaginian Punic continued to be spoken in inland and rural areas as late as the mid-5th century. It is probable that Berber languages were spoken in some areas as well.
' was a name of the volcano in frequent use by the authors of the late Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire. Its collateral forms were ', ', ' and '. Writers in ancient Greek used or . Many scholars since then have offered an etymology. As peoples of varying ethnicity and language occupied Campania in the Roman Iron Age, the etymology depends to a large degree on the presumption of what language was spoken there at the time. Naples was settled by Greeks, as the name ', "New City", testifies. The Oscans, a native Italic people, lived in the countryside. The Latins also competed for the occupation of Campania. Etruscan settlements were in the vicinity. Other peoples of unknown provenance are said to have been there at some time by various ancient authors.
The dominance of Latin among the literate elite may obscure the continuity of spoken languages, since all cultures within the Roman Empire were predominantly oral. In the West, Latin, referred to in its spoken form as Vulgar Latin, gradually replaced Celtic and Italic languages that were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin. Commonalities in syntax and vocabulary facilitated the adoption of Latin.
The original Latins were an Italic tribe inhabiting central Italy, in present-day Lazio. Through the conquests of their most populous city-state, Rome, the Latins united all Italic tribes in to one group and then with "Romanization" or "Latinization" spread their influence across their empire. As the Roman Empire spread to include areas that are now Spain, Portugal, France, and Romania, these joined Italy in becoming "Latin", as the languages spoken in these countries derive primarily from the Latin Language. In the late 15th–16th centuries, a millennium after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Portugal, Spain, and France began to create world empires. In consequence, by the mid-19th century, the former American colonies of these nations became known as "Latin America" and this region's inhabitants as "Latin Americans".
Latin was the official language of the Roman army until the mid-6th century, and remained the most common language for military use even in the Eastern empire until the 630s.[31] By contrast, only two bishops are known to have spoken Latin at the ecumenical councils held during the reign of Theodosius II (d. 450 AD).[32]
The dominance of Latin and Greek among the literate elite may obscure the continuity of spoken languages, since all cultures within the Roman Empire were predominantly oral.[51] In areas where Syriac, Coptic, Hebrew and Aramaic were spoken, they coexisted with Greek.[52]
At the end of the 4th century the Roman Empire had effectively split into two parts although their economies and the Church were still strongly tied. The two halves of the Empire had always had cultural differences, exemplified in particular by the widespread use of the Greek language in the Eastern Empire and its more limited use in the West (Greek, as well as Latin, was used in the West, but Latin was the spoken vernacular).
The term "common speech" ("sermo vulgaris"), which later became "Vulgar Latin", was used by inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Subsequently, it became a technical term from Latin and Romance-language philology referring to the unwritten varieties of a Latinised language spoken mainly by Italo-Celtic populations governed by the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.
Latino-Faliscan, also known as the Western Italic languages: Faliscan, which was spoken in the area around Falerii Veteres (modern Civita Castellana) north of the city of Rome Latin, which was spoken in west-central Italy. The Roman conquests eventually spread it throughout the peninsula and beyond, in the Roman Empire. Romance languages, the descendants of Latin (evolved dialects of Latin) Venetic, spoken in northeastern Italy by the Veneti. Osco-Umbrian or Sabellian, or Eastern Italic languages: Oscan, which was spoken in the south-central region of the Italian Peninsula Marrucinian Paeligni Sidicini Umbrian (not to be confused with the modern Umbrian dialect of Italian), which was spoken in the north-central region Volscian Hernican Marsian, the language of the Marsi South Picene, in east-central Italy Sabine in Lazio and the central Apennines Pre-Samnite Unknown classification Aequian Vestinian Unknown Sicel, spoken in eastern Sicily by the Sicels (limited attestation).
Of course, the most famous Indo-European language in Italy is Latin, whose diffusion coincided with the expansion of Roman power. It must be recognized that the Romance languages ended up imposing themselves on the vernacular languages in many of the territories that were occupied by the Roman Empire, making the Italic branch the second most spoken in the world among the Indo-European languages, with about 550 million speakers.
Due to invasions from the Scythians and their sub-group, the Alans, into Azerbaijan, Armenia, and other places in the Caucasus, the places gained a larger, although small, Iranian population. Parthian, along with other Iranian dialects and languages was spoken in Khorasan, while to the further east in places which were not always controlled by the Sasanians, Sogdian, Bactrian and Khwarazmian was spoken. To the further south in Sistan, which saw an influx of Scythians during the Parthian period, Sistani was spoken. Kirman was populated by an Iranian group which closely resembled the Persians, while, farther to the east in Paratan, Turan and Makran, Balochi and non-Iranian languages were spoken. In major cities such as Gundeshapur and Ctesiphon, Latin, Greek and Syriac were spoken by Roman/Byzantine prisoners of war. Furthermore, Slavic and Germanic were also spoken in the Sasanian Empire, once again due to the capture of Roman soldiers. Semitic languages including Himyaritic and Sabaean were spoken in Yemen.
While Latin remained the main written language of the Roman Empire, Greek came to be the language spoken by the well-educated elite, as most of the literature studied by Romans was written in Greek. In the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which later became the Byzantine Empire, Latin was never able to replace Greek, and after the death of Justinian, Greek became the official language of the Byzantine government. The expansion of the Roman Empire spread Latin throughout Europe, and Vulgar Latin evolved into dialects in different locations, gradually shifting into many distinct Romance languages.
Beginning with Plautus's time (254–184 ), one can see phonological changes between Classical Latin and what is called Vulgar Latin, the common spoken language of the Western Roman Empire. Vulgar Latin differed from Classical Latin in phonology and morphology as well as exhibiting lexical differences. However they were mutually intelligible until the 7th century when Classical Latin 'died' as a daily spoken language, and had to be learned as a second language (though it was long thought of as the formal version of the spoken language). Vulgar Latin was the ancestor of the Romance languages, including Old French.