Ebook: The Regional Diversification of Latin

Classical Latin appears to be without regional dialects, yet Latin
evolved in little more than a millennium into a variety of different lan-
guages (the Romance languages: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese
etc.). Was regional diversity apparent from the earliest times, obscured
perhaps by the standardisation of writing, or did some catastrophic
event in late antiquity cause the language to vary? These questions
have long intrigued Latinists and Romance philologists, struck by the
apparent uniformity of Latin alongside the variety of Romance. This
book establishes that Latin was never geographically uniform. The
changing patterns of diversity and the determinants of variation are
examined from the time of the early inscriptions of Italy, through
to late antiquity and the beginnings of the Romance dialects in the
western Roman provinces. This is the most comprehensive treatment
ever undertaken of the regional diversification of Latin throughout its
history in the Roman period.
j . n . a d a m s is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College,
Oxford. His recent publications include Bilingualism and the Latin
Language (Cambridge, 2003) and Pelagonius and Latin Veterinary
Terminology in the Roman Empire (1995).