ROMANCE LANGUAGES, the languages derived from the Latin tongue. These lan guages are very largely Latin in vocabulary and grammatical structure. The Romance lan guages had their being in the territory included within the Roman Empire. But not all of this territory produced Latin tongues for the sim ple reason that not all of it had become so Latinized that the Roman language had become that of the masses of the people. Through the colonizing efforts of Spain, Portugal and France, the Romance languages have spread beyond their original habitat, especially to Cen tral and South America, where they have be come the official speech of over 80,000,000 peo ple. Romance languages are also spoken in many of the West Indies and part of Canada.
Italy, in the days of the Roman Empire, was subject to strong dialect influences against which the literary tongue had constantly to struggle. Little by little these influences gained the upper hand and literary Latin began to lose its complex grammatical forms and to become more analytical in construction. The northern end of the Italian Peninsula was considerably influenced by the so-called barbarian invaders and the south was overrun by Greeks, Cartha ginians, Phcenicians and other races. The downfall of Greece had brought to Rome thou sands of Greek scholars and teachers, all of whom were forced to use the Latin tongue, in which many of them learned to write fluently. These Greek scholars had a very considerable influence upon the development of the Latin language. In the later days of the Roman Empire, German and other mercenaries were extensively employed in Italy and throughout the Latin domains and prominent and influential men from the provinces in France, Spain, Britain and other parts either paid long visits to Rome, or lived there with their families. The number of these foreigners resident in Rome alone was very great, so that the cosmo politan centre, where three languages, Latin, Greek and Italian, seem to have been recognized by the authorities as early as the first half of the 1st century of the Christian era, for we are told that one of the Caesars returning from a protracted and successful military campaign gave the customary popular festivities belong ing to such an occasion, which, in this case, lasted a month. One part of these festivities consisted of dramatic entertainments open to the public and given in Latin, Italian and Greek.
The suggestive part of this act is that the Greek colony in Rome, at this early date, was so strong and so influential as to demand official recognition at the hands of a returning conqueror seeking public favor. Quite as sug gestive i4 the fact that the dialectic influence at work within the Imperial City had already be come so strong as to demand recognition at the hands of the authorities. The popular speech must have already become very considerably 'differentiated from the literary tongue, since it was thought good politics to give public plays in the former. Out of the service of people from all over Italy, in the Roman army for many years, sprang a sort of common tongue that was very considerably different from Classical Latin. This bastard Latin was carried by the army to every country over which the arms of Rome triumphed. Thousands of Roman soldiers and other Italian colonists settled in the provinces and many of them termarried with the natives. As the way to preferment everywhere throughout the Roman Empire could only be found through the ac quirement of the Latin tongue, the study of Latin seems to have soon become popular in the provinces, where the speech of the Roman soldier was naturally much more prevalent than the Classical Latin of the literary men and the higher government officials. In this way the so-called Low Latin became domesticated in the provinces, where it seems to have been ac cepted everywhere as the most convenient medium of business transactions not only with the natives but also with the Roman colonists from the interior and south of Italy. This curious lingua franca, if it may be so called, seems to have continued its disintegrating in fluence upon the Classical Latin tongue, which rapidly lost most of its grammatical inflections and became analytical in form. This change must undoubtedly have assumed definite shape in the tongue of the masses sonic considerable time before we have any existing record of it in the shape of surviving documents written in the popular speech. It began early to influence literary or written Latin, and its iconoclastic hand is seen strongly in the Vulgate which has made many concessions to the popular speech; and in other Latin writings of the same and somewhat earlier and later periods.