The Common Tongue and Latin

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

Or maybe more like modern English?

Certainly, it's a language that unites communication of many diverse groups. My question is what kind of people spoke each language. Judging by Gandalf's comments in Rohan, one would expect people even in low ranks to speak Common if their job has any interaction with foreigners. A village with no external trade and no road with travellers nearby might not have Common speech though. How widespread or restricted was Latin in the Middle Ages? Was ot a language of the well educated, or would other classes master it as well?

Define "Middle Ages". In the early centuries practically every place in the West recently ruled by the Roman Empire spoke Latin, except for Britain. Already, though, demotic vulgar Latin differed quite a bit from book-Latin, so that by 618 a synod instructed Gallo-Roman priests to give sermons in "the rustic Roman tongue," which had evolved away from Classical/Church Latin to the point the "Latin-speaking" commoners couldn't understand the latter. Give it another century and a half, the "rustic Roman tongue" would become Old French. Similar processes were happening in Spain, Romania and everywhere else that Latin had bulldozed away the pre-Roman languages. (In Italy, as late as Dante's day they thought they were speaking Latin!)

So in that sense, Westron does resemble Latin, especially in its relationship to Adunaic: a worn-down and hybridized form of the former Ruling Empire's language. OTOH, in some ways Latin's role in Middle-earth is taken by Sindarin. Note that in early drafts, Tolkien posited that the Common Speech was of Eldarin derivation, and thus akin to Latin's historical role on both sides.

But T may also have been thinking of the actual "lingua Franca" of the Middle Ages, which wasn't actually proper langue d'oil French but rater a Provencal/Catalan creole, spread mostly by sailors.