extinct romance languages

What made Latin survive more in some parts of the empire than others, for example in the places where modern Romance languages still exist to this day?

Apparently there was once a type of separate British Romance, Pannonian Romance, and African Romance language, each developing on their own and some are thought to have survived the downfall of the empire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Latin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannonian_Romance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Romance

There was also a Dalmatian language in the Balkans and another unique Romance language around the Istria peninsula of Croatia. I'm surprised to hear about it surviving in North Africa; I guess it must have been colonized fairly heavily. Why don't you hear about any unique brand of Vulgar Latin/Romance surviving in say Palestine, Egypt, or Anatolia, which were under Roman control for a substantial amount of time? Another weird thing is how Latin managed to survive in the province of Dacia despite the short duration of occupation (less than 200 years), where in Britain it died out despite a Roman presence being there for around 400 years.

<<Why don't you hear about any unique brand of Vulgar Latin/Romance surviving in say Palestine, Egypt, or Anatolia, which were under Roman control for a substantial amount of time?>>

Because Roman language survived only among the most primitive peoples who had nothing better to do than to mimmick Romans like little monkeys.

Peoples who had some degree of cultural selfhood and sophistication were not wanting for such things. To them, the Romans were nothing more than war-mongering barbarians.

They were Romans...all these people who speak today a romance language are the grand, grand, grand children of the Romans.

What did you expect? To see the Romans remnants in the empire speaking Hebrew, German, English? The Romans continued to live after the empire collapsed and only the invasions of other nations made that the Romans from the actual Portugal to not be able to communicate anymore with the ones from Italy or from Romania, for instance.

The numerous migration nations who penetrated into the former Roman Empire territories created islands of Romans communities. The Romans unity couldn't be preserved at an empire scale therefore, once isolated; they started to develop separate as they could.

In isolation, they opened contacts with the new nations of migrants from now living in their neighborhood, influenced each other, borrowed words and expression from each other and so, they alienated more and more from their old brothers.

<< Why don't you hear about any unique brand of Vulgar Latin/Romance surviving in say Palestine, Egypt, or Anatolia, which were under Roman control for a substantial amount of time? >>

-- Most sensible explanation is that even before the Romans came those areas used Greek as their lingua franca, which didn't leave any space to Romance.

In the Eastern half of the empire the only part that wasn't yet penetrated by Greek culture at the time of the Roman conquest was present day Romania.

<<They were Romans...all these people who speak today a romance language are the grand, grand, grand children of the Romans. >>

Nope. Not exactly. A truer statement would be like this: "Many Romance speakers today might have some Roman blood in them."

Truth is, not even Italians are of full Roman bloodline and descent. Wis, there is some deal of Roman blood present in French leed, Spanish leed, Portuguese, etc., but this was an admixture to pre-roman populations, and has been watered down even more over time by invaders that followed. This Roman admixture itself was not very "Roman" either--it was a hodge-podge mongrel race from all over the known world.

"speakers of romance languages are the great great grand children of the Romans"...HA!

Albanian is in a way a Romance language, it has some Roman derived words - probably due to the closeness of the Italian peninsula. Romanian prior to the 19th century was like the Albanian language, however, it revolutionized its language to inclined itself more to its Latin roots (i.e. alphabet, wordage and the like) to make itself more Westernized. The truth of the matter is that the Latin language as the culture per se has left a mark in its former domain.

"What made Latin survive more in some parts of the empire than others"

Very interesting. I think that if antic british (i mean the whole of population, not elites) didn't adopt romance language, this was because they were not christianised before the 6th century. And this can explain how has the gauls been "latinized" : not by the roman merchants or legions, but by the christian religion, which had become the official one of the empire (4th century i guess). When christianism has come in Britain, there was no more empire, so nor prestige neither useness for latin.

Other point : no romance language in Balkans. Has the shift come after the sission of the empire (395 AD), or was this region more "resistant" to romance language ?

The real mystery remains Romania : it is still a question (with violent nationalist debates) if romance language was first there (so the invaders should be the hungrians), or if romanians immigrants have come in middle-age in the region from Danube (so, they should be less legitimate for the region than hungrians - in hungrian mind obviously).

@La Hostia

Albanian shares with Romanian just a few hundred words (the common root, not the exact word), most likely from a Illyrian/Thracian substrate. Otherwise, the two languages have nothing in common and never had in the past millenium. Romanian is a typical Romance language (with some old Bulgarian mixed in it), whereas Albanian belongs to an extinct Indo-European language branch.

Albanian and Romanian share something in commong: both languages are spoken mainly by gypsies.

^uh, i'm gonna go ahead and ignore that

anyway, yeah it is kind of a mystery about their origin, seeing as there are some later latin and christian-related words, which would indicate a development within the empire south of the danube, but there are some artifacts north of it in latin dealing with christianity from the late empire to migration periods 4th-6th century, and not that much evidence for a migration; but there is also related ethnic groups in greece and macedonia like aromanians. so who knows

Thor said:

"Other point : no romance language in Balkans. Has the shift come after the sission of the empire (395 AD), or was this region more "resistant" to romance language ? "

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Actually there are Romance languages in the Balkans today, other than Romanian. Currently, Aromanian has the largest number of speakers in the Balkans proper (which excludes Romania), and despite the name, and some mutual intelligibility with Romanian, it has a distinct development. Aromanian was probably the language of the Romanized Illyrians and Macedonians. Currently it is spoken in Southern Macedonia and Albania, and Northern Greece.

Keep in mind that Illyrium (which covered territories of the former Yugoslavia+Albania) was thoroughly Romanized by the time of the split of the Roman Empire (with the exception of Albania). Only the massive arrival of the Slavs in Illyrium managed to displace the Latin language, but even so the population of the former Yugoslavia is a mixture of Slavs and Romanized Illyrians.

The domination of the Bulgarian Empire in the region also helped spread the Slavic culture. Bulgarian Empire was directly interested in creating a distinct cultural identity for its subjects - distinct from the Greek/Roman identity of the Byzantine Empire. Bulgarian and Byzantine Empires violently exchanged territories for hundreds of years, and assimilation/reassimilation issues were very important for them.

This is why, although by 600 AD, population in the Balkans was speaking either Greek or Latin, Eastern Romance languages are almost extinct today. Nevertheless, the so called Vlach population, Romance speakers in the Balkans, still exists in small communities, see this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlachs

It is generally accepted that Gypsies migrated out of India into Europe as early as the eleventh century. There are records of their having arrived in Spain as early as 1425 and in Barcelona, in particular, by 1447. At first they were well received and were even accorded official protection by many local authorities.

In 1492, however, when official persecution began against Moors and Jews to cleanse the peninsula of non-Christian groups, the Gypsies were included in the list of peoples to be assimilated. For about 300 years, Gypsies were subject to a number of laws and policies designed to eliminate them from Spain as an identifiable group: Gypsy settlements were broken up and the residents dispersed; ; they were denied their language and rituals as well as well being excluded from public office and from guild membership.

In conclusion, the 300 years of gypsies assimilation (during which period Gypsies were required to marry non-Gypsies) and due to the well known high rate of birth by Gypsies obviously Spain became today a Gypsy nation. Nothing bad about it but some of them, like Franco for example, need to put more effort for emancipation. He still have to work out understanding the moral values.

Now, talking about western values, Franco has forgotten to say that by the time the Easterner were enjoying philosophy, arts, science or conquered the world - (Great Alexander), created the first republic and implemented democracy in a state for the first time in the human history, the Westerner were still climbing trees, eating uncooked meat, drinking horse milk and so on.

I am fed up with you and your Western values... values which are in fact the 2000 years and older Easterner values. You are using our ancient values and discoveries now and pretend to be our teachers. Are you serious? Are you not ashamed of yourselves? Isn't that an idiocy? What's you name, Franco?

El portugués está amenazado de extinción.
Portuguese and spanish are convergent languages.In a few centuries all Iberian Peninsula will speak the language of the most strong-castille.
Is just a matter of time until portugal be annexed by spain.
By the way,nobody today learn portuguese because portuguese is a sublanguage of spain.today, everybody learn spanish and travel to portugal.

Corrects me if im wrong.

HAhahahahahaha...no it wont happen! Portuguese is not a sublanguage of that garbage you speak. Its been hundreds and hundreds of years and Portuguese has gone the other direction, getting more different than Spanish, specially Brazilian Portuguese. Spanish is shit

If Portuguese was to be extinct, it wouldve been when Spain invaded Portugal..that didnt happen then, it wont happen now nor ever.