African Romance
African Romance, African Latin or Afroromance is an extinct Romance language that was spoken in the various provinces of Roman Africa by the African Romans under the later Roman Empire and its various post-Roman successor states in the region, including the Vandal Kingdom, the Byzantine-administered Exarchate of Africa and the Berber Mauro-Roman Kingdom. African Romance is poorly attested as it was mainly a spoken, vernacular language. There is little doubt, however, that by the early 3rd century AD, some native provincial variety of Latin was fully established in Africa.'
After the conquest of North Africa by the Umayyad Caliphate in 709 AD, this language survived through to the 8th century in various places along the North African coast and the immediate littoral,' with evidence that it may have persisted up to the 14th century,' and possibly even the 15th century,' or later in certain areas of the interior.
Background
The Roman province of Africa was organized in 146 BC following the defeat of Carthage in the Third Punic War. The city of Carthage, sacked following the war, was rebuilt during the dictatorship of Julius Caesar as a Roman colony, and by the 1st century, it had grown to be the fourth largest city of the empire, with a population in excess of 100,000 people. The Fossa regia was an important boundary in North Africa, originally separating the Roman occupied Carthaginian territory from Numidia,' and may have served as a cultural boundary indicating Romanization.'In the time of the Roman Empire, Latin became the second most widely spoken language after Punic, which continued to be spoken in Carthaginian cities and rural areas as late as the mid-5th century.' It is probable that Berber languages were spoken in some areas as well.
Funerary stelae chronicle the partial Romanization of art and religion in North Africa.' Notable differences, however, existed in the penetration and survival of the Latin, Punic and Berber languages.' These indicated regional differences: Neo-Punic had a revival in Tripolitania, around Hippo Regius there is a cluster of Libyan inscriptions, while in the mountainous regions of Kabylie and Aures, Latin was scarcer, though not absent.'
Africa was occupied by the Germanic Vandal tribe for over a century, between 429 and 534 AD, when the province was reconquered by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. The changes that occurred in spoken Latin during that time are unknown. Literary Latin, however, was maintained at a high standard, as seen in the Latin poetry of the African writer Corippus. The area around Carthage remained fully Latin-speaking until the arrival of the Arabs.
Origins and development
Like all Romance languages, African Romance descended from Vulgar Latin, the non-standard form of the Latin language, which was spoken by soldiers and merchants throughout the Roman Empire. With the expansion of the empire, Vulgar Latin came to be spoken by inhabitants of the various Roman-controlled territories in North Africa. Latin and its descendants were spoken in the Province of Africa following the Punic Wars, when the Romans conquered the territory. Spoken Latin, and Latin inscriptions developed while Punic was still being used.' Bilingual inscriptions were engraved, some of which reflect the introduction of Roman institutions into Africa, using new Punic expressions.'Latin, and then some Romance variant of it, was spoken by generations of speakers, for about fifteen centuries.' This was demonstrated by African-born speakers of African Romance who continued to create Latin inscriptions until the first half of the 11th century.' Evidence for a spoken Romance variety which developed locally out of Latin persisted in rural areas of Tunisia – possibly as late as the last two decades of the 15th century in some sources.'
By the late 19th century and early 20th century, the possible existence of African Latin was controversial,' with debates on the existence of Africitas as a putative African dialect of Latin. In 1882, the German scholar used unconvincing material to adduce features particular to Latin in Africa.' This unconvincing evidence was attacked by Wilhelm Kroll in 1897, and again by Madeline D. Brock in 1911.' Brock went so far as to assert that "African Latin was free from provincialism",' and that African Latin was "the Latin of an epoch rather than that of a country".' This view shifted in recent decades, with modern philologists going so far as to say that African Latin "was not free from provincialism"' and that, given the remoteness of parts of Africa, there were "probably a plurality of varieties of Latin, rather than a single African Latin".' Other researchers believe that features peculiar to African Latin existed, but are "not to be found where Sittl looked for it".'
While as a language African Romance is extinct, there is some evidence of regional varieties in African Latin that helps reconstruct some of its features. Some historical evidence on the phonetic and lexical features of the Afri were already observed in ancient times. Pliny observes how walls in Africa and Spain are called formacei, or "framed walls, because they are made by packing in a frame enclosed between two boards, one on each side". Nonius Marcellus, a Roman grammarian, provides further, if uncertain, evidence regarding vocabulary and possible "Africanisms". In the Historia Augusta, the North African Roman Emperor Septimius Severus is said to have retained an African accent until old age. More recent analysis focuses on a body of literary texts, being literary pieces written by African and non-African writers. These show the existence of an African pronunciation of Latin, then moving on to a further study of lexical material drawn from sub-literary sources, such as practical texts and ostraca, from multiple African communities, that is military writers, landholders and doctors.'
The Romance philologist James Noel Adams lists a number of possible Africanisms found in this wider Latin literary corpus. Only two refer to constructions found in Sittl, with the other examples deriving from medical texts, various ostraca and other non-traditional sources. Two sorts of regional features can be observed. The first are loanwords from a substrate language, such is the case with Britain. In African Latin, this substrate was Punic. The African dialect included words such as ginga for "henbane", boba for "mallow," girba for "mortar" and gelela for the inner flesh of a gourd.' The second refers to use of Latin words with particular meanings not found elsewhere, or in limited contexts. Of particular note is the African Romance use of the word rostrum for "mouth" instead of the original meaning in Latin, which is "beak",' and baiae for "baths" being a late Latin and particularly African generalisation from the place-name Baiae. Pullus meaning "cock" or "rooster", was probably borrowed by Berber dialects from African Romance, for use instead of the Latin gallus.' The originally abstract word dulcor is seen applied as a probable medical African specialisation relating to sweet wine instead of the Latin passum or mustum. The Latin for grape, traditionally indeterminate, male or neuter, in various African Latin sources changes to the feminine acina. Other examples include the use of pala as a metaphor for the shoulder blade; centenarium, which only occurs in the Albertini Tablets and may have meant "granary"; and infantilisms such as dida, which apparently meant "breast/nipple" or "wet nurse". A few African Latin loanwords from Punic, such as matta and Berber, such as buda also spread into general Latin usage, the latter even displacing native Latin ulva.
Both Africans, such as Augustine of Hippo and the grammarian Pompeius, as well as non-Africans, such as Consentius and Jerome, wrote on African features, some in very specific terms. Indeed, in his De Ordine, dated to late 386, Augustine remarks how he was still criticised by the Italians for his pronunciation, while he himself often found fault with theirs.' While modern scholars may express doubts on the interpretation or accuracy of some of these writings, they contend that African Latin must have been distinctive enough to inspire so much discussion.
Extinction as a vernacular
Prior to the Arab conquest in 696–705 AD, a Romance language was probably spoken alongside Berber languages in the region. Loanwords from Northwest African Romance to Berber are attested, usually in the accusative form: examples include atmun from temonem.Following the conquest, it becomes difficult to trace the fate of African Romance. The Umayyad administration did at first utilize the local Latin language in coinage from Carthage and Kairouan in the early 7th century, displaying Latin inscriptions of Islamic phrases such as Dus tu Dus et aus non e, a variation of the shahada, or Muslim declaration of faith. Conant suggests that African Romance vernacular could have facilitated diplomatic exchange between Charlemagne and the Aghlabid emirate, as the Frankish-given name for the Aghlabid capital is Fossatum which is reflected in the name today Fusātū.
African Latin was soon replaced by Arabic as the primary administrative language, but it existed at least until the arrival of the Banu Hilal Arabs in the 11th century and probably until the beginning of the 14th century. It was spoken in various parts of the littoral of Africa into the 12th century, exerting a significant influence on Northwest African Arabic, particularly the language of northwestern Morocco.
Amongst the Berbers of Ifriqiya, African Romance was linked to Christianity, which survived in North Africa until the 14th century. Christian cemeteries excavated in Kairouan dating from 945 to 1046 and in Áin Zára and En Ngila in Tripolitania from before the 10th century contain Latin inscriptions demonstrating continued use of written liturgical Latin centuries into Islamic rule; graves with Christian names such as Peter, John, Maria, Irene, Isidore, Speratus, Boniface and Faustinus contain common phrases such as "requiem aeternam det tibi Dominus et lux perpetua luceat tibi or Deus Sabaoth from the Sanctus hymn. Another attests to the dual usage of the Christian and the Hijri calendars, reading that the deceased died in Anno Domini 1007 or 397 annorum infidelium There is also a Vetus Latina Psalter in Saint Catherine's Monastery dated to 1230, which has long been attributed to African origin due to its usage of African text and calendar of saints. The Psalter notably contains spellings consistent with Vulgar Latin/African Romance features, such as prothetic i insertion, repeated betacism in writing b for v and substituting second declension endings to undeclinable Semitic biblical names. Written Latin continued to be the language of correspondence between African bishops and the Papacy up till the final communication between Pope Gregory VII and the imprisoned archbishop of Carthage, Cyriacus in the 11th century. Spoken Latin or Romance is attested in Gabès by Ibn Khordadbeh; in Béja, Biskra, Tlemcen, and Niffis by al-Bakri; and in Gafsa and Monastir by al-Idrisi, who observes that the people in Gafsa "are Berberised, and most of them speak the African Latin tongue." In the passage, Al-Idrisi mentions that "there is a fountain called ", which could derive from therma There is also a possible reference to spoken Latin or African Romance in the 11th century, when the Rustamid governor Abu Ubayda Abd al-Hamid al-Jannawni was said to have sworn his oath of office in Arabic, Berber and in an unspecified "town language", which might be interpreted as a Romance variety; in the oath, the Arabic-rendered phrase bar diyyu could represent some variation of Latin per Deu
In their quest to conquer the Kingdom of Africa in the 12th century, the Normans were aided by the remaining Christian population of Tunisia, who some linguists, among them, argue had been speaking a Romance language for centuries.
The final attestations of African Romance come from the Renaissance period. The 15th century Italian humanist makes the most significant remarks on the language and its features, reporting that a Catalan merchant named Riaria who had lived in North Africa for thirty years told him that the villagers in the Aurès mountain region "speak an almost intact Latin and, when Latin words are corrupted, then they pass to the sound and habits of the Sardinian language". The 16th century geographer and diplomat Leo Africanus, who was born into a Muslim family in Granada and fled the Reconquista to Morocco, also says that the North Africans retained their own language after the Islamic conquest which he calls "Italian", which must refer to Romance. A statement by Mawlā Aḥmad is sometimes interpreted as implying the survival of a Christian community in Tozeur into the eighteenth century, but this is unlikely; Prevost estimates that Christianity disappeared around the middle of the thirteenth century in southern Tunisia.