In Dublin, where I live, you can walk through the city centre on any day of the week and hear two or three of the Romance languages being spoken. These are the languages descended from Latin, and in their main groupings consist of French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, and Portuguese. According to the most recent Census data for the Republic of Ireland (collected in 2022), after English, Polish, and Irish, four of these Romance languages are the next most spoken languages in the country. Italian is twelfth, while in places six through to eleven come Lithuanian, German, Chinese, Malayalam, Arabic and Russian.
This data reflects the increasing diversity of the Republic in the 21st century; that Latin, the language I teach in university, should still be present in its modern forms on the streets of Dublin, is something that fascinates me. A child learning Italian, to give the briefest example, knows that the stress on the word amico/amica (‘friend’) goes in the middle of the word, as it did in Latin. There is a kind of history here, a human chain, stretching back through many centuries of spoken language. Chatter, babble, and conversation existed in ancient Latin too, even if we can only imagine what it must have sounded like.
Latin is most often associated with power and prestige, whether in the campaigns of Julius Caesar, famous and influential works of literature, or the workings of philosophers, scholars, and politicians across centuries of European and world history. In Living Latin: Everyday Language and Popular Culture, I’ve tried to go in the other direction, and to seek out evidence that shows us more mundane, more ordinary sides to the language across its long life. This evidence survives on bits of pottery, fragments of ancient papyrus, birchwood, and lead, and much of it has only been discovered in the last 50 years or so. It provides glimpses of the language of everyday life, used to invite friends to birthday parties, curse the person who’s stolen your cloak, or simply to record your name on the tile or the pot that you’ve made. It shows us a language much less stable, and much more diverse, than the heavily standardised version of Latin that comes from a particular era of ancient Rome and has been taught in schools ever since.
Before it is celebrated as literature, or even written down, language is already a creative and independent act, used by humans all over the world to think and to communicate. Think about how you talk, the next time you’re talking quickly to a close friend, or consider how, for many people, learning a second language is a necessity rather than a luxury, and something achieved with little ceremony. History, too, is something that exists on intimate and personal levels as well as on world-changing ones. Human beings, however privileged or bereft they might be, tend to live in the day-to-day, rather than in the big moments.
I’ve been going in search, then, of the Latin of ordinary people, as it survives in evidence from across the Roman empire, from its earliest times as a small Italian city state to the beginning of the Middle Ages: an artisan’s signature on a golden brooch, verse inscriptions on the gravestones of Roman children, and the graffiti of Christian priests in tunnels beneath the city. Sometimes it is a work of literature that, paradoxically, gives the biggest hint about what ordinary Latin might have sounded like. The Roman comedic playwright Plautus, like Shakespeare, found his material ‘in the lives of the people’ (as James Baldwin wrote in his 1964 essay ‘Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare’) and, like Shakespeare, he channelled their conversation into taut and copious verse. ‘Greetings to you, my unhoped-for father’, a young woman says on rediscovering her long-lost parent in Plautus’ The Rope, a play which informed The Tempest. What to a modern university reader might appear melodramatic, in another time and place must have been more realistic, particularly one where slavery meant that parents and children were often separated, and forever.
If the idea of a ‘people’s history’ of Latin is to be meaningful, it must encompass not just the idea that there is a history of ordinary Roman life that is there to be imagined and recovered, but the idea that Latin, in all its fantastic diversity, is something for everyone. One of the reasons why Latin has been prestigious for so long (not to mention why you might think of the Roman Empire more often than your friends), is that it has been patronised by powerful groups in society. At the same time, in their long afterlives, the language and its culture have managed to escape the confines of palaces and universities more often than you might think. In 18th-century Ireland, an oppressed religious majority set up underground ‘hedge’ schools around the country at which basic literacy, mathematics, and sometimes Latin were taught, the language becoming, in a small but important sense, an anti-colonial resource.
Latin has had a politics – a closeness to power and an exclusive place in education – since the days of the Roman Empire. But it also represents a democratic archive of world history: called upon when people have needed language that is special and sacred, unnoticed in the roots of words and the origins of customs and concepts, encountered in those same works of power and influence by readers who have come to their own conclusions and often created things in turn. The challenge is to hold two things in tension, letting each balance the other: Latin is unique; Latin is the same as every other human language.
The translation from Plautus’ The Rope quoted above is by Wolfgang de Melo.
Charlie Kerrigan is the author of Living Latin: Everyday Language and Popular Culture and is Assistant Professor in Latin in the Department of Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. He’s also the author of Virgil’s Map (Bloomsbury, 2020) and blogs at Confabulations as part of the Living Latin Project at TCD.
