spread of Latin

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

I recommend an interesting work by Ramsay Macmullen, ROMANIZATION IN THE TIME
OF AUGUSTUS (Yale University Press, 2000).

It contains a good summation of what's known about Italian emigration to the
provinces in the late Republican and early Imperial period.

This turns out to have been on an enormous scale -- Augustus alone, in his
40-year reign, settled no less than 500,000 legionary veterans and other
citizen colonists in the provinces, mostly in Africa, Spain and Gaul,
although with some outliers to the east.  This would be about a third of the
total citizen population of Italy in the first century CE.

500,000 adult males represents at least 2,000,000 people in all, counting
women, children and household servants, all of whom would have been
Latin-speakers.  The linguistic evidence in Spanish Latin supports this; it
contains a distinct "rustic" element, which one would expect if it was spread
by the mass-migration of peasant farmers (and ex-peasant conscript veterans)
from the Italian countryside, and by the contact of the indigenous population
with those migrants.

(Rather than acquisition as a "learned" langauge from books and a small
elite.)

Spain received around 175,000 colonists (600,000 or more people in all)
during the period between Caesar's victory in the civil wars and the death of
Augustus; that would represent an increase in the total population of around
a fifth, and a much higher percentage in the southern and east-coast areas
where the colonizing effort was concentrated, affecting both the cities and
the countryside.

Macmullen finds a very rapid and thoroughgoing Romanization (or
"Italianization") in other cultural areas -- field layouts, agricultural
technique, house types, domestic implements and foodstuffs, etc.

This all has implications for the general question of linguistic succession,
since the spread of Latin (and its Romance successors) at the expense of
Celtic and other western European languages is one of the larger instances in
historic times.  In general, it would tend to support "migrationist"
explanations.