What was the last country/region/city state to speak latin as the official language?
Monday, August 17th, 2009 at
3:19 pm
What was the last country/region/city state to speak latin as the official language? As in universly, everyone, peasants, nobles, priests, ect.. Thank you in advance!
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Tagged with: country region • peasants • priests
Filed under: Written and Spoken Latin
There’s no way to tell for sure, since languages don’t work that way – you’re not speaking vulgar Latin on August 4, 887, and suddenly speaking French on August 5, 887. Based on national languages, the last to give up vulgar Latin was most likely Spain. In rural and mountainous areas, a form of vulgar Latin lived on – there is no reliable record of the last to give up. A guess would be the mountain areas of current Switzerland, where the Romance language Romansch still survived.
The Vatican speaks Latin to this very day! And officially it is an independent country.
Must have been the Roman Republic (508 BC – 27 BC), I guess. During the Roman Empire the official languages were Latin and Greek, and the Classical Latin was slowly replaced by Vulgar Latin, and later on by Proto-Romance dialects/languages.
And a Papal bureacracy using Church Latin only for official business in the Papal States, and later on in Vatican City, doesn’t really count as an "official language".
Latin remains the official language of The Vatican.