The Romans spoke Latin, the language of government, law, and the army across the empire. In the eastern provinces, Greek was just as important, and educated Romans usually spoke both.
Latin is the short answer, but the fuller picture is more interesting. The empire was multilingual, its everyday Latin sounded different from the textbook version, and that spoken Latin is the direct ancestor of languages spoken by hundreds of millions of people today, including a fair amount of English.
Latin was the official language
Latin began as the local language of Rome and the region around it, called Latium. As Rome conquered, Latin traveled with its soldiers, officials, and settlers. It became the language of law codes, army commands, coins, monuments, and administration from Britain to North Africa. If you wanted to do business with the Roman state, you did it in Latin.
Greek was the other great language
Rome conquered the Greek-speaking world but never replaced its language. In the eastern half of the empire, Greek remained the everyday language of cities, trade, and learning. Well-educated Romans learned Greek the way people today learn a prestige second language, and much of Roman literature, philosophy, and science was written in or borrowed from it. After the empire split, the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire became thoroughly Greek-speaking.
Classical Latin vs. everyday Latin
The elegant Latin of Cicero and Virgil, the kind taught in classrooms, was a literary standard. Ordinary people spoke a looser, faster form scholars call Vulgar Latin (from vulgus, "the common people"). It is this spoken Latin, not the polished written kind, that slowly changed from region to region until it became new languages.
How Latin became the Romance languages
After the western empire fell, spoken Latin kept drifting apart in each region until it turned into the Romance languages, a family whose name literally means "descended from Roman." The main ones are:
- Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Romanian
- plus Catalan, Galician, and many regional tongues
Together they are spoken natively by well over a billion people. English is not a Romance language, but centuries of contact, especially after the Norman Conquest, packed it with Latin-derived vocabulary anyway.
15 Latin phrases you still use
You speak a little Roman every day without noticing. A few that survive intact:
| Phrase | What it means |
|---|---|
| et cetera (etc.) | and the rest, and so on |
| i.e. (id est) | that is |
| e.g. (exempli gratia) | for example |
| vice versa | the other way around |
| per se | in itself |
| status quo | the existing state of things |
| quid pro quo | something for something; a trade |
| bona fide | genuine; in good faith |
| ad hoc | for this specific purpose |
| alibi | elsewhere |
| versus (vs.) | against |
| alma mater | the school you attended ("nourishing mother") |
| de facto | in practice, whether official or not |
| post mortem | after death |
| carpe diem | seize the day ("pluck the day") |
Some phrases even come straight from famous Romans. Veni, vidi, vici, "I came, I saw, I conquered," was reportedly Julius Caesar's summary of a lightning victory, and carpe diem was coined by the poet Horace.
The alphabet is Roman too
The letters you are reading right now are the Latin alphabet, adapted by the Romans from earlier Greek and Etruscan forms and then carried across their empire. It became the most widely used writing system in the world. Even the abbreviation SPQR, still stamped around modern Rome, is a small piece of everyday Latin that never went away.
Sources: standard references on Latin, Greek in the Roman world, and the development of the Romance languages. The label "Vulgar Latin" describes ordinary spoken Latin and is a modern scholarly term, not something Romans called their own speech.
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