Who killed Latin?

Latin is a dead language, but did you know that it lived long after the fall of the Roman

Empire? Only when Renaissance scholars tried to save Latin did the language begin to

ossify into the sterile tongue it has been ever since.

Latin — the language of Rome, from everyday people to government, business, and

scholarship — helped hold the Roman Empire together as long as it existed. And after

the Rome-based western empire declined, Latin hung on in Western Europe. (The

eastern, Byzantine Empire spoke Greek.) Educated people all over Western Europe

continued to communicate in Latin. All the courses and debates at medieval universities

were conducted in the language; the universality of Latin was really cool if you were a

professor, because whether you were from Ireland or Italy, you could be just as much

at home in a German classroom as a colleague from Cologne. That applied to students,

too, who didn’t have to understand French to study in Paris.

As living languages do, Latin kept growing and changing. Grammatical uses shifted.

Sentence structure became a little simpler here and a bit rougher there. Then in the

Renaissance, scholars began reading Latin from texts that were 1,500 years old and

realized how different their Latin was from the language of the great Roman

rhetorician, Cicero.

With their newfound appreciation of pre-Christian classics, these scholars saw Cicero’s

Latin as the original, uncorrupted language: the right stuff. So they worked hard on

turning the clock back on their own scholarly language, making strict rules of grammar

and usage and enforcing them as an important part of a classical education. Schoolboys

all over Christendom conjugated Latin verbs, which may have been a good tool for

building disciplined young minds, but it was the beginning of the end for Latin. By

losing its flexibility, Latin no longer lived the way ever-changing English, for example,

lives today.