Prof A. Cristofori
Roman Italy: the Republican conquest of Italy, his organization and administration and his evolution during the Empire

(2)
The linguistic unification of Italy
by Charlie Hofacker

My question concerns the languages spoken in Italy. I am curious as to the diffusion of Latin throughout Italy. I assume that before the Republican conquest, each small geographic area had its language, or at least dialect. How quickly did Latin encroach on these local languages? How thoroughly did it encroach? In other words, centuries after the Republican conquest, say in the full Imperial era, what percentage of the population on the Italian peninsula spoke Latin? Would it have just been highly educated individuals?

The question needs a brief introduction about the methodological disposition on the documentation. Unfortunately the sources we have don't allow us to have absolute certainties neither on the times, neither on the depth of the diffusion of Latin in detrimental to the other languages. The documentation in our possession is defective and doesn't concern that the written forms, while we know nothing of the spoken ones. To report a percentage of the populations speaking Latin rather than a language of preroman Italy in a certain moment of the development of history of ancient Italy is therefore absolutely impossible.
The evaluations that we are able to do are rather "impressionistic" and founded on some indication of the Greek and Latin authors and on the survivals of the preroman languages in the dialects of modern Italy, substantially on the epigraphic documentation.
The turning point of the linguistic unification of Italy seems to be the II century b.C. In this time the dominion of Rome on Italy is consolidated with the reaching of the padana lowland, as we have seen answering another question; so Latin. Certainly it is not the literary language that we have studied: it is rather the language spoken by the soldiers, the veterans, the farmers and the merchants or, in some way, the language written of the administration, that certain has something of the literary Latin, but it preserves its own characteristics. It is nevertheless also the language of the leading city of Italy: knowing Latin had to confer a dignity and a special prestige to an inhabitant of a small center.
The latinization of Italy is not imposed from Rome, but it is rather the result of pushes of various type: first, Latin naturally spreads in the peninsula thanks to the farmers coming from Rome and from Latium; from the colonies the language of Rome has probably diffused in the surrounding zones, perhaps above all following mixed marriages with the natives. Also the merchants and the soldiers could have had a smaller role in this topic. We have then to consider that along the whole course of the I century b.C., with the installation of the veterans of the armies of Sulla, Caesar and of the triumviris, in Italy we assist to a real demografic remixing, from which undoubtedly the Latin got out strengthened: it seems enough obvious that a veteran installed in a colony of northern Italy, used to communicate with his new fellow citizens that originated even from the Etruria, from the Piceno or from the Sabina using Latin as a sort of "language of exchange".
Beyond these general considerations, it is worthly to examine some relative concrete cases of some linguistic areas of Italy whose documentation is enough meaningful.
In Umbria the penetration of Latin is a very slow and deprived phenomenon, that started at the beginning of the II c. b.C. to end at the half of I c. b.C.. We have for example a II c. registration from Foligno that remembers the construction of a fountain from the Marones (highest magistrates of the city) T Foltonius and S Petronius; the document, in umber language, is written with Latin characters. In the near Todi the sepulchral registration of a man, Lars Dupleio, is still written with etruscans characters, but those of his daughter and his nephew appear already compiled with the Latin alphabet. In the second half the II c. b.C. we have the first attestations of the use of the Latin language. One of the most ancient examples are represented by a graffiti on a container with the name of his owner (A. Degrassi, Inscriptiones latinae liberae rei publicae, Firenze 1963-1965, II, 1206); the registration is bilingual, the name appears in effects first in the form umbra Numesier Varea Folenia, "Varia, (wife) of Numerio Folenio", then in the simplified Latin form Nomesi Varia (it is an archaic Latin: in classical Latin we would have Numeri Varia): we are assisting at a phase where Latin flanks the native language and prepares to supplant it. In the years following the social war of 91-88 b.C. the umber language maintains its vitality, although only for the religious use, that is particularly conservative (we have to think to the resistance of Latin in the Catholic liturgy); also the more recent Tables of Gubbio are written with umber language, even if with Latin alphabet, while the first examples of this extraordinary document were compiled with etruscan alphabet.
In the near Etruria the march of Latin seems to end slightly later: it is true that a dedicated text in Latin coming from S. Giuliano, in the southern part of Etruria (now in the province of Viterbo) could go back even to the III c. b.C. (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, I2, 4, 2870), but the registrations exclusively compiled in Latin language are rare for the whole II c. b.C., while the bilinguis Latin-Etrusch are rather numerous in the I c. b.C.. As regards for the last documents of the Etruscan language, despite a lot of uncertainties for the date of most part of the texts, a firm point is perhaps given by the grave of the Hepeniis in Asciano, in the territory of Siena, in which three urns with Etruscan writings containing coins of August have been found (see W.V. Harris, Rome in Etruria and Umbria, Cambridge 1971, p. 179); some documents of approximately the same time come from Arezzo and from the sepulchre of the Volumniis in Perugia. The impression is that in the northern and central part of Etruria, particularly in the most distant places from the great streets of communication as Asciano, that language remains in use up to the final decades of the I c. b.C.; in the southern part of the region, instead, Latin had become already prevailing toward the 80-70 a.C., as it is shown by the analysis of the texts brought in the so-called Tomba delle Iscrizioni in Caere. Later the knowledge of Etruscan seems to be limited to some terms, tied up to the religious practices proper of that people as the Aruspicina, and known only to a narrow entourage of erudites. Ammianus Marcellinus writes (XXIII, 5, 10) that still in 363 AD the aruspicis with the last pagan emperor, Iulianus, would have been able to read their sacred books: did it deal with books written in Etruscan? We do not know.
In the vast linguistic area osca we have to distinguish between the costal region of the Tyrrhenian and the inner areas of the center-southern Appennino. On the coast the arrival of Latin is relatively precocious: Livius (XL, 43, 1) narrates that "That year [the 180 a.C.] it was granted to the Cumanis, behind their application, to use the Latin as official language and the public town crier they had the right to treat the sales in Latin". The fact that in Cuma, ancient Greek colony already fallen in the hands of osc populations at the end of the V sec. b.C., Latin was adopted as official language of the administration, shows also that the language in the first decades of the II c. b.C. had to be also diffused among the popular layers, in place of Greek and Osco.

In the inside zones the progress of the Latin was much slower: still in the first years of the I c. b.C. in Pietrabbondante the graffiti that appear on a tile attest that in the ceramic shops used to work beside side men speaking Osc and Latin (P. Poccetti, New italic documents to complement of the Manual of E. Vetter, Pisa 1979, pp. 42-43, n°21). In the following years the vitality of Osc is attested by the legendes of the coinage of the italic rebels (E. Vetter, Handbuch der italischen Dialekte, Heidelberg 1953, n° 200g), in which the linguistic choice undoubtedly has a political value; above all is the constitution of the city of Bantia, in Lucania, one of the most important documents for the knowledge of the Osc language (Vetter, cit., n°2 and Poccetti, cit., pp. 132-136, n° 185). But really the Table Bantina shows the progress completed by Latin, although in hidden form. The text is in Osc, but it reflects linguistic and mental structures that were proper of Romans and Latin: think to the formula perum dolom mallom behind which it is not difficult to see the Latin expression sine dolo malo. We don't know any document in Osc datable to the first half of the I c. b.C., apart from the discussed painted texts in Pompeii published by Vetter (cit., nn. 23-35), whose editing is by some studious set AD behind the destruction of the city in 79, by others many decades before.
A different talk should be done about Greek language, whose use in some old Hellenic colonies of southern Italy prolongs him up to the last years of the republican age and even in the full imperial one. The testimoniances on the permanence of the Greek culture in Naples, Velia, Reggio, Locri and Taranto are relatively numerous, but the most explicit test of the use of that language is a famous footstep of the Life of Nero of Svetonius, in reference to Naples. In the chapter 20 the biographer, dwelling upon the emperor passion for the song, remembers: "...he didn't stop singing if not after having finished his piece. He was listened for a lot of times and for more days; once during a moment of rest for his voice, impatient of that loneliness, gone out of the bath he returned in the theater and, after having eaten in the middle of the orchestra, in front of a considerable crowd he promised, speaking in Greek, to make listen to something more sonorous". We could also remember the good number of Greek registrations of late-republican or imperial age coming from Velia, Reggio, Locri, Taranto and above all Naples, where still in the II c. a.C. elegant texts are engraved in Hellenic language (picked and studied recently by E. Miranda, Greek Registrations of Italy. Naples, Rome 1990-1995).
Two are, mainly, the reasons for this phenomenon: first of all the prestige kept by Greek culture during the whole Roman period, that sheltered in a certain measure the Hellenic language from the offensive of Latin. Second, the continuity of contacts among these grecity islands of southern Italy with the Mediterranean eastern countries in which the Greek was the matherlanguage or however the lingua franca of common use: it was also probably thanks to the arrival of oriental elements ellenofoni (talking Greek) that the grecity in some places of southern Italy succeeded in withstanding for a long time. Still today in southern Italy, particularly in the provinces of Reggio Calabria and Lecce, exists a small number of Greek linguistic minorities: in 1924 a famous researcher, Gerhard Rohlfs, proposed to see the signs of an uninterrupted Greek cultural continuity from the times of the colonization until today (G. Rohlfs, Griechen und Romanen in Unteritalien. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der unteritalischen Gräzität, Florenz - Genf 1924; translation Italian linguistic Excavations in Great Greece, Rome 1933). The hypothesis aroused vivacious discussions, particularly from that studiouses that preferred to bring back those minorities from the Middle Age and the Byzantine occupation. But the one theory doesn't perhaps exclude the other: it is not impossible that the Byzantine presence beginning from the VI c. has renewed and revitalized a "classical" grecity that was not completely extinct yet.
About the languages of northern Italy, in the lowland padana, we see how the local idioms were precociously replaced by the Latin in consequence of the big human losses that the Gallic populations had suffered during the wars of conquest and the intense colonization of populations coming from center-southern Italy among the end of the III c. b.C. and the end of the following century. But it would be logical to expect that the local languages, mostly the Celtic and Rhetic ones, have withstood much longer in the alpine area, that entered in the full control of Rome only with August.
Despite the remaining of some linguistics "islands" in which some different idioms were still officially used, we can affirm that Latin was spoken in augustean age by all the inhabitants of Italy and universally used in the public contexts. Probably the preroman languages were spoken in the family and local circles, particularly among the popular classes, but the sources, as I remembered before, are substantially mute about this.
The signs of a persistent vitality of the preroman linguistic substratum can be noted more than in the peculiarities of Latin of ancient Italy, in the local dialects of modern Italy, in which resurface some regional differences of many centuries before. Only two simple examples: the assimilation of nd and mb in nn and mm that we find again in many dialects of central Italy (e.g. the romanesc monno from the Latin mundus, while in Italian we have mondo) perhaps goes up again to a particularity of the Osca pronunciation, for example testified in Roman age by the handwriting Verecunnus (for Verecundus) of a pompeian epigraphy.