Hey Look here. This is a map of lingustic areas of Byzantium: I don't know if the map is 100% academic accurate, but it somehow fits with the other maps I have encountered when I read about Byzantine Empire. I'm just curious: What language did people speak in Alexandria the city? If you could turn time back and walked in Alexandria, would the vast majority of city-dwellers speak both Greek and Coptic? Or would the Alexandrians speak Greek while the people outside Alexandria would speak Coptic? And how about in Syracuse? Did people inside the city speak Greek and Latin? Or did people inside city speak Greek only? And how was it during the reign of Augustus or Trajan in the first century when both western and earstern parts of Roman Empire existed? Did they also speak Greek in Syracuse in that time? Or did it first appear during the Justinians Gothic wars? In case one of you have a conclusive academic answer I would be happy to know it. I might not have time or energy to respond, but I would appreciate it. Have a nice day.
It varies through time, of course. By 750, Arabic would have been the official language in the regions marked below (though many of the languages from the 580 map would have persisted in daily use):
Under the Roman Empire it seems that a very simple Greek was the lingua franca of most of the Mediterranean, while Aramaic had the same position in the Middle East. The New Testament was written in Greek for a reason... Greek was like English today, a kind of "globish". C. AD 400 saint Augustine who was the bishop of Hippo (today Annaba, Algeria) noticed that the peasants outside the city spoke a curious language, and they said it was "Cananean", that is Phoenician Aramaic in its Punic dialect. The official language of Carthage, razed to the ground in BC 146, was still spoken in North Africa more than 500 years after. These people probably had no problem switching to Arabic in the 7th c., for Arabic is relatively close to Aramaic. In the Byzantine Empire, under Justinian for ex., most people spoke Greek but Latin was still an official language. It was used by judges and lawyers. The Justinian Code, a compendium of Roman law, is in Latin. Latin was also the official language of the army, and the official language used on coin legends, but that does not mean much: after all the obverse legends of the UK coins are still in Latin, like the Byzantine coins, but who speaks Latin today in UK?
I recall reading years ago, and I cannot remember where, that the Christian churches of both the extreme south of Italy and in parts of Sicily circa the Eleventh Century were still using the Eastern rite of Catholic Christianity with clergy being appointed by Eastern bishops and the liturgy in Greek. I think the book may have been on the Norman incursions into the region and that it was their presence and take over of both regions that saw the Latin rite of Rome becoming the dominant and eventually the exclusive rite of worship.
I recall reading years ago, and I cannot remember where, that the Christian churches of both the extreme south of Italy and in parts of Sicily circa the Eleventh Century were still using the Eastern rite of Catholic Christianity with clergy being appointed by Eastern bishops and the liturgy in Greek. I think the book may have been on the Norman incursions into the region and that it was their presence and take over of both regions that saw the Latin rite of Rome becoming the dominant and eventually the exclusive rite of worship.
I look at these maps and it seems silly to me that people trying to live and work together would speak so many different languages. Then it occurs to me that, 2000 years later, we still haven't made any progress on this front. It's mind boggling to me that, as a species, we haven't realized the detrimental effects of language barriers and put some real effort into shifting toward something more unified.
The natural evolution of human languages has always been diversification, not unification, thus "progress on this front" would mean even more languages spoken. The Mediterranean has always been surrounded by peoples speaking a lot of different tongues, but I don't think there was ever a real language barrier between them, for since the prehistoric times people have always been aware that different languages existed, and they can roughly understand other languages than theirs. There was also a special phenomenon in the Mediterranean: the use of a "lingua franca" in the medieval and modern period. In the 1600-1700s for example, in every port city around the Mediterranean, merchants and sailors of different nations could use a kind of special language based on Italian with a lot of Arabic and Turkish words. It was called "lingua franca", "the language of the Francs", and obviously developed since the middle ages, in the 12th c., when Italian merchant fleets dominated the whole Mediterranean. In Antiquity it was the Greek language that was understood almost everywhere. Today it is "globish", a simplified form of English, and the existence of a global language does not affect the development of national or even regional languages and dialects.
If we are defining "progress" based on the natural evolution of language, then of course you are correct. I'm talking about progress in the direction of eliminating language barriers. Yes, there are workarounds and stand-ins that can allow a multi-lingual, economic system to work well enough. And, given these mechanisms, it might seem as though pursuing a single pervasive language would be a matter of convenience, but it's actually more than that. During times of civil stress (whatever the stressor might be), we are biologically pre-programmed to dehumanize groups that represent obstacles to our goals. We do this consciously and subconsciously by convincing ourselves that the differentiating factors between the groups makes "them" inferior. Our distant ancestors were selected to have this tendency because it had survival benefits, and differences in language simply serve as a really convenient places to draw hard lines. Put more simply, it's difficult to empathize with somebody that can't verbally express themselves in a way that means anything to you. Put even more simply, it's more difficult to kill somebody that is begging for their life as opposed to spouting out a bunch of meaningless gibberish (from your perspective). In the end, the world would have a much better chance of being a better place if we all spoke the same language. I'm just surprised that we haven't put a bit more effort into moving in that direction.
