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Language

The native language of the Romans was Latin, an Italic language the grammar of which relies little on word order, conveying meaning through a system of affixes attached to word stems. Its alphabet was based on the Etruscan alphabet, which was in turn based on the Greek alphabet. Although surviving Latin literature consists almost entirely of Classical Latin, an artificial and highly stylised and polished literary language from the 1st century BC, the spoken language of the Roman Empire was Vulgar Latin, which significantly differed from Classical Latin in grammar and vocabulary, and eventually in pronunciation. Speakers of Latin could understand both until the 7th century when spoken Latin began to diverge so much that 'Classical' or 'Good Latin' had to be learned as a second language.

While Latin remained the main written language of the Roman Empire, Greek came to be the language spoken by the well-educated elite, as most of the literature studied by Romans was written in Greek. Most of the emperors were bilingual but had a preference for Latin in the public sphere for political reasons, a practice that first started during the punic wars. In the eastern part of the Roman Empire (and later the Eastern Roman Empire), Latin was never able to replace Greek, a legacy of the Hellenistic period. Justinian would be the last emperor to use Latin in government and marks when Greek officially took over. The expansion of the Roman Empire spread Latin throughout Europe, and Vulgar Latin evolved into many distinct Romance languages.