African Latin

A lingustic map of the Byzantine Empire in the year 560. The light blue part of Africa spoke African Latin. Via Brilliant Maps.

African Latin (-146 to 1154?), also known as African Romance or Africitas, is the dialect of Latin spoken in Roman Africa, in what is now Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, and Morocco. Its main city was Carthage, which at one point was the second largest Latin-speaking city.

Like British Latin (and Pannonian and Moselle Latin), it died out before giving birth to a modern Romance language like French, Italian, or Spanish.

It lasted till at least 1154, when al-Idrisi wrote of Gafsa in southern Tunisia:

“Its inhabitants are Berberised, and most of them speak the African Latin tongue (al-latini al-afriqi).”

It may have lasted in Tunisia till the late 1400s.

Had it lived, that part of Africa would most likely speak a language that seems kind of like Spanish but with more k-sounds, with Berber and Semitic words. But it would be even more like Sardinian, its closest living relative.

Influences: Punic (Carthaginian) and Tamazight (Berber), both Afro-Asiatic languages that were spoken in that part of Africa before Latin arrived and would have affected its vocabulary and pronunciation. Augustine’s mother (St Monica), for example, was Berber. Many veterans lived near Berber lands. In Roman times, Punic was mainly spoken in the countryside, Tamazight out in the desert, Latin in the cities.

Writing: Augustine, Terence, Suetonius, Apuleius, Tertullian, Cyprian, and grammarian Marcus Cornelius Fronto are all from Roman Africa. But they generally wrote in a literary dialect they learned at school. The same goes for the lawyers who wrote the legal documents that have survived. But from their mistakes and complaints we can work out some of the:

Pronunciation:

• Dropped m’s at the ends of words, with -um becoming -u, and -am becoming -a.
• Mixed up b and v
• Always pronounced c’s as k’s, not softening them to an s or ch before e and i as in other Romance languages.
• Mixed up short and long vowels (Augustine: “African ears have no quick perception of the shortness or length of vowels.”)

Thus rostrum became rostru and meant “mouth” and not “beak” because the Latin words for mouth (ōs) and bone (ŏs) are separated only by the difference of a long and short o.

In “De Ordine”, written by Augustine in 386, he remarks how he was criticized for his pronunciation by Italians. Septimus Severus, the Roman emperor from 193 to 211, had an African accent.

Some scholars say this accent affected the Latin that would become Spanish and Portuguese by way the Muslim invasion of the 700s: many of the soldiers who took part would have spoken African Latin.

Borrowings: Spanish and Tamazight, and maybe Northwest African Arabic and Maltese too, seem to have words that come from African Latin. For example:

• the pollo of arroz con pollo in Spanish probably comes from Berber by way of the African Latin pullus, meaning “rooster”.
• ġasru (castle, village) in Berber, likely comes from Latin castrum by way of what would have been an African Latin castru.

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• Roman Empire
  • Roman Africa
  • Romanization
• Latin
  • Vulgar Latin
    • Spanish
    • Sardinian
• Africans in the Greek and Roman world
  • St Augustine
    • Augustine’s Bible – in which Augustine complains about the dreadful Latin of African Christians, copied from a bad Latin translation of the Bible
• al-Idrisi
• Afro-Asiatic languages
  • Arabic
  • Aramaic

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