Ad Infinitum

[Rumo]

Many languages in the modern situation have been the result of modern government influences. If the Britsih governemnt would not have sponsored language programs in Wales and Scotland, Wesh and gaelic would be in a bad state, I presume.
In France, the rise of the modern nation state did much to promote the French language over local dialects. Among them Germanic ones. The current language border between Germanic and Latin languages does not really date back to the Roman empire..

Linguistic borders are fluid, they always change. Even now, as we speak, some people in a contact area forget more of their maternal language, learning more of a new one. In such circumstances, the relatively stable frontier between Germanic and Romance dialects is a sign of continuity, not of lack of it. The Western Romance area is amazingly fitting a map of the Western Roman Empire and it's no coincidence it is so.

One book I like a lot (even though I have read it only in translations but few passages from the original quoted by others) is Lucien Musset's Les Invasions. Les vagues germaniques (first edition Paris, 1965, re-edited many times in many languages). Today, decades after its first edition, I still find that book a monument of erudition and scholarship, albeit some of its assumptions and perspectives need to be updated. It touches many aspects of the conflict between Romans and non-Romans in ways few other books do. One such aspect is the linguistic frontier between Romance and Germanic languages in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages. I'm attaching a map from my Romanian edition:

[attachment=0:201afyf2]<!-- ia0 map2.jpg<!-- ia0 [/attachment:201afyf2]

I hope the map is clear enough. Anyway, here are few important details if you can't figure them out from the Romanian legend:
- the upper border (+) represents the Roman frontier in the 5th century
- the vertical lines show the territorial gains of Germanic languages between 5th and the 9th century.
- the white squares are Romance enclaves.
- the horizontal lines show the territorial gains of Germanic languages after the 9th century
- the dots show the territorial losses of Germanic languages (to Romance) after the 9th century

Now let's imagine a zoom-out to a view of the entire Western Europe. This frontier shift will become small and nevertheless most of the changes date from Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages, predating with many centuries the formation of modern states. Modern states which do not have a similar history: in Middle Ages we have a France and an England, but we don't have a Germany or an Italy.

And what would mean the influence of modern states anyway? Are we to imagine that Gaulish (pre-Roman) or Frankish (post-Roman) were widely spoken in France until the French Revolution?

However, there's an undoubtely modern influence over the language map, but that's not really a new phenomenon: literary languages promoted in front of the non-literary dialects by various institutions (also educational ones: universities, schools), media, elites. However this happened in every civilization with a written culture (think of Classical Latin vs the numerous varieties of sub-standard Latin, which we often call Vulgar Latin)

Like I said, Latin was NOT the only language in Gaul during the 5th c., so it would be presumptious to speak of 'Germanic failing to suppress Latin'.

Latin was not the only language, but that Latin was the most spoken language.
If one hundred people speak Latin, that one shepherd still speaking Gaulish living in isolation in a mountain valley or that one Frankish soldier having serious difficulties when articulating a sentence in Latin are rather insignificant exceptions to any general assessment of the situation.