Year: 2023
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This chapter investigates the mutual impact of Christianization and Latinization in the western provinces of the Roman Empire. First, it explains why Christian communities switched from Greek to Latin and why this process was relatively slow. Second, it shows that in the West there is no evidence of a missionary design focused on the population speaking in vernacular languages, resembling the one in the East. It attributes this difference mostly to a lack of western vernacular-speaking elites. Finally, it argues that religion played only a minor role in either speeding up or slowing down the Latinization in the West in late antiquity. Overall this chapter claims that Latinization smoothed the way for the spread of Christianity, but the inverse impact was not strong. Christian cult and church institutions may have played a role in familiarizing people with Latin and in some places could have tipped the linguistic balance towards it. However, their role in the broader, ongoing linguistic change, which resulted in the Latinization of a large part of Western Europe, was limited.
Author: Robert Wiśniewski
Institution: University of Oxford
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4389749570