You are correct, basically only Vatican actively uses latin these days, and even they don’t really converse in it or anything. And it is “just” church latin, not classical latin, which was the written standard for Roman times, nor vulgar latin, which was what people actually spoke (and which in short evolved into other romance languages we still have these days). There’s still some academic latin in use, but it’s basically disappearing as well, though some universities still allow you to submit your thesis in it etc.
So yeah, latin is very much dead as a native language, but it’s “alive” through other means (a lot of use survive in science and law for example, and it’s still widely taught in different schools and universities and all that). English itself has kinda absorbed a lot of latin, something like 25% of the vocabulary is straight from latin, and I had one professor claim you could technically link up to 75% of the english vocabulary to latin if you accept it’s evolved and/or gone through other languages.
But really, unless you manage to slaughter all the people speaking it in or they stop teaching it to their children and thus it disappears in a relatively short period of time, languages don’t really “die”, they just evolve into something else as time passes. So it can be a bit hard to describe when something as widely used as latin really died
I thought there was still an island in the Mediterranean where Latin isn’t dead.
Ixnay on the islanday
Themiscyra?
Latin didn’t really disappear, it changed and split up
AFAIK the only place where latin is commonly used as the main language is Vatican City
And their accent sucks.
it’s not really commonly used, it’s the official language yes but only a few people actually talk it and they are all in official positions
You are correct, basically only Vatican actively uses latin these days, and even they don’t really converse in it or anything. And it is “just” church latin, not classical latin, which was the written standard for Roman times, nor vulgar latin, which was what people actually spoke (and which in short evolved into other romance languages we still have these days). There’s still some academic latin in use, but it’s basically disappearing as well, though some universities still allow you to submit your thesis in it etc.
So yeah, latin is very much dead as a native language, but it’s “alive” through other means (a lot of use survive in science and law for example, and it’s still widely taught in different schools and universities and all that). English itself has kinda absorbed a lot of latin, something like 25% of the vocabulary is straight from latin, and I had one professor claim you could technically link up to 75% of the english vocabulary to latin if you accept it’s evolved and/or gone through other languages.
But really, unless you manage to slaughter all the people speaking it in or they stop teaching it to their children and thus it disappears in a relatively short period of time, languages don’t really “die”, they just evolve into something else as time passes. So it can be a bit hard to describe when something as widely used as latin really died