In his book Roman Africa, Gaston Boissier argues that the evidence from inscriptions is clear: people of the lower classes in Roman Africa were Latin-speakers on the same level with Latin-speakers in all the other Latinized provinces. (There is another translation of this book by Arabella Ward, but this new translation, which appeared first in Dr. Boli’s Random Translations, is better.)
It must have been in the last centuries of the Empire, at the moment when Christianity was triumphing, that Latin became the dominant language in Africa. Not only was it spoken in the cities, but there is no doubt that it had penetrated into the countryside as well; a portion of the 20,000 inscriptions that compose our epigraphic collections come from thence. There, as everywhere, the epitaphs are what tell the story: they show us that people of all conditions, and the lowest conditions at that—tailors, butchers, cobblers, freedmen and slaves, wished to have a few words of Latin on their tombs.
Naturally the Latin of these poor people is often a very poor Latin. Faults abound in it; we have no cause for astonishment. Yet some have tried to draw quite extraordinary conclusions from it: it seemed that it was a proof of barbarism, and it has been claimed that a society in which Latin was so badly spoken had only been lightly touched by Roman civilization. But the truth is exactly the reverse. If the inscriptions were of irreproachable correctness, we might suppose that they were composed only by professional literary men, and that below that level only the idioms of the country were understood. The improprieties of terms, the grammatical errors, the solecisms and barbarisms that are encountered on almost every line show us that we are dealing with ignorant people; that they spoke Latin badly, but at least they spoke it. Thus it is not simply a scholarly and official language, which certain pedants use on account of vanity; it is a language in use, and, like every living language, it adapts to the people who use it and changes with their degree of culture. However much the epitaphs in general may be made up of set formulas, which could be copied almost without understanding them, there are some in Africa that escape that banality, and in which one is surprised to catch a sincere and personal expression. We must suppose, therefore, that the Africans ended up making themselves masters of a language that was at first foreign to them, since they used it to express the sentiments that meant the most to them. A native, from whom death had just taken his child, writes on the little tomb he raises these words, into which he has poured his soul: Birsil, anima dulcis! [C.I.L., 16582.] Once in a while we sense an effort to find words that express the deepest feelings. Epithets accumulate in praise of a lost wife or mother (piissima, pudica, laboriosa, frugi, vigilans, sollicita, etc.); or, in the case of a young girl, the most joyous images are borrowed from nature (ut dulcis flos, ut rosa, ut narcissus) without ultimate satisfaction. Often prose is not enough for these desperate mourners; they write the verses that grief dictates to them:
Hos pater inscripsi versus dictante dolore [Ibid., 1359.]
Grief, we must admit, often dictates detestable verses to them, but their very faults have this advantage: that they prove that Latin was spoken at all levels of African society.
Furthermore, these faults are perfectly similar to those committed elsewhere at the same era. This is what the publication of the Corpus of Latin inscriptions has permitted us to state with confidence. In that Corpus we see that there is very little in the Africans’ solecisms and barbarisms that belongs particularly to Africa; they are almost always shared with the rest of the Empire. We had already seen that those who spoke Latin well spoke it nearly the same way; the inscriptions show us that there were no more different ways of speaking it badly. To mention only the Africans’ most frequent errors, we see that they are foggy in their grammar; they confound the conjugations; they do not distinguish the tenses of verbs well; they no longer know which cases prepositions govern; but, if we open the epigraphic collections of other countries, we shall see that the people of Spain and Gaul were no more able or scrupulous grammarians. In Africa, as elsewhere, they mix up genders incessantly; they can hardly tell masculine from feminine, and the neuter is on its way to being suppressed. I do not insist on the habit the Africans had of not taking account of final consonants which must have been sounded very lightly when they were pronounced; that suppression was very convenient to those who presumed to make verses, and permitted, for example, a bereaved husband to write on his wife’s tomb:
Et linguit dulces natos et conjuge dignu. [C. I. L., 9117.]
for conjugem dignum, which could not end a hexameter. But the old Latins did not write otherwise, and the same thing was done throughout the Latinized provinces. As was natural, these alterations with time became more serious. Latin soured as it spread; it was spoken worse and worse the more it was spoken by poorer and more ignorant people. Toward the end of the Empire, in a little city in Byzacena, speaking of a Christian who had lived forty years, five months, and seven hours, this was the expression used: Bixit anos quragita, meses cequ, ora setima. [C. I. L., 12200.] Here we seem to have the peak of barbarity, and a way of speaking that smells Libyan and Numidian; and yet there were, at the same era, in the very capital of the Empire, people who wrote no better. The catacombs are full of equally barbarous inscriptions, and in them we can find almost every word used by that Christian of Byzacena. There are likewise other errors that the poor people of Africa committed; nearly every one of them will be found elsewhere.
——Gaston Boisset, L’Afrique romaine, promenades archéologiques en Algérie et en Tunisie.
