Did all medieval people talk latin?

Answer 1

No. Very few people in the Middle Ages could speak Latin, which is a snapshot of a language frozen in time that was spoken by the elite educated classes in Rome between about 100 BC and 100 AD. Like all languages so-called Classical Latin had evolved from an earlier language, and it would continue to evolve, in different ways in different lands, spawning the modern languages spoken in France, Italy, Spain, Romania and a handful of other places. Latin as we think of it was probably not spoken much beyond the 4th or 5th centuries except by a handful of people, and it may well NEVER have been spoken by the majority of Romans, who spoke a much more simple, common form of the language than that preserved in texts written by Cicero, Caesar, Tacitus et al. Because of its association with both the mighty Roman Empire and with Christianity, Latin continued to be used long after the Roman empire had fallen, but only in elite educated circles, and particularly by the Church. Its use was widespread in terms of geography, probably much wider than when the Roman Empire itself existed, but primarily as a written language, used for official proceedings, historical records, legal documents, church records, etc. The very fact that it was not widely used gave it a sense of prestige and mystery.

The vast majority of people throughout medieval Europe spoke Latin based languages or Germanic languages or Slavic languages. In countries that were once part of the Roman Empire Latin based languages were the most common. These were languages that had changed in the course of time so much from the Latin spoken in the 1st century AD that they would eventually become distinct dialects, then even distinct languages. In medieval France of 1200 years ago, for example, you would have been able to find dozens of different dialects in different regions, most of which were understandable to the others, but all of which were sufficiently different to be labelled separate dialects, and even languages. In modern Italy today you can still hear distinctly different dialects in different regions, vestiges of the common (vulgar) Latin spoken 200 years ago, and a result of the geographical and political isolation of varying regions that occurred in Italy following the collapse of the Roman Empire, and, in fact, was already in place before the fall. No telephones and televisions means that the people across the valley tend to speak funny. 'Folk in those parts speak mighty strange.' Multiply those differences over many hundreds of years and eventually you get entirely different languages.