Why don't Italians speak Latin? Which romance language

>>1698583
>Which romance language is closest to Latin?
Italian

>>1698583
>Why don't Italians speak Latin?
Because languages evolve and split dumbass

>Which romance language is closest to Latin?

Romanian has the closest grammer vut pronunciation wise it's Italian

>>1698589
Why would it split if its spoken in the same area?

>>1698600
Not that anon, but I'd assume it's because of cities and provinces being disconnected from one another, developing their own slang and grammatical rules/exceptions which eventually became a fundamental part of the language.

>TL;DR: They evolved similar to the way European and Asians evolved separately from one another

>>1698600
Dialects form. Not every ancient agreek spoke the same greek dialect. Same with Romans. Areas like Iberia, Dacia, Gaul, and Dalmatia developed their own dialects.

>>1698600
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aal9VSPkf5s

>>1698633
>>1698635
This is exactly what happened.

>>1698583
People in the Western half of the empire spoke (although only in the later antiquity) vulgar Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian are derivatives of those vulgar Latin dialetcs

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>>1698600
Rome assimilated alot of non native Latin speakers. In Spain and Portugal there were Celt-Iberians. In France there were Gauls. In Dacia there were Dacians and on the adriatic coast there were Ilyrians.

Italian is literally "vulgar Latin". Italians stopped speaking proper Latin during the 7th and 8th century.

Of course the modern Italian national language is the vernacular of Tuscany, established as the literary language by Dante in the 13th century.

Sardinian is the closest modern day language to Latin

>>1698583
They never stopped speaking Latin, it just changed into Italian over time.

>>1698657
What caused them to stop speaking proper latin in the 7th/8th century?

Languages naturally change over time, much more so when most people are illiterate and hardly anyone travels. In extreme cases, every village gets their own dialect.

>>1698665
Vulgar Latin in the late Empire, then the Empire fell, so the only institution left to "preserve the purity" is the clergy.

They never had an education system and mass media to make plebs speak the real thing, it's a completely different situation from, say, today's Italian language.

>>1698665
Eastern Rome was driven off from all but the southernmost tips of Italy by that time, independent city-states were forming such as Venice, the Papal States, Milan and Sicily, the division of the states led to independent cultural/linguistic developments that created dozens of Italian dialects, with no standardized Italian form being taught until Florentine-Italian was decided to be the Italian standard after unification.

>>1698681
Also Latin remained the only written language, but the illiterate couldn't be affected by this, Latin continued to be influenced by the language people actually spoke, becoming more and more vulgar and preparing for what would become the many Italian regional languages.

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>>1698679
>In extreme cases, every village gets their own dialect.
Or their own language.

Latins were fucked and cucked for centuries, they are about as Roman as Southern France now.

>>1698692
Then enter Dante Alighieri, he writes De Vulgari Eloquentia in Latin, and before he finishes it he starts writing The Divine Comedy in Lingua Volgare.

He proved once and for all the poetic potential of Volgare, and would eventually be called the father of the Italian language.

>>1698708

Rome is a city. Italians were always separate from Romans from Rome.

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>>1698696
Appen e's right

>>1698583
>Why don't Italians speak Latin?
Languages evolve. Late republic romans couldn't understand monarchy latin (Cicero complains about how obscure and archaic the latin used in ancient prayers and the oldest annals is), and that's a mere 500 years earlier, why would italians speak classical latin 2000 years later?

>>1698725
> Cornish language