Let's get one thing straight with all this language talk. Until the mid 18th century, with the rise of nationalistic sentiment, there has never really existed the idea of an "official language." The latter was created as means of generating and supporting a national identity. Most of the nations we are referring to in Civ had no official languages during their golden age the courtiers of the age often didnt even speak the local vernaculars (the "peasant" languages). Indeed many nations today have more than one official language and many residents are very multilingual
History isn't that lineair. The Romans really did their best effort into promoting Latin over every other language. Darius I also really made Aramaic the official language.
It was with the fall of the Roman Empire Latin began to decline among the population, as well as literarcy and well as many other things of their civilization.
Katherine of Russia was born in central germany and spoke german and learned french -thus at her court these languages predominated.
True. Her native language was indeed German. At the court she indeed spoke French. She learned Russian to speak with her personel also.
Napoleon may have been corsican and spoke Italian at but this wouldn't be unusual as france of the mid 18th century had no standard french and even the langue d'oc in the south was almost incomprehensible to many parisians, as was gascon.
Napoleon, however, really admired Pasquale Paoli, and even dreamed of kicking the French out of Corsica one day. His admiration of Paoli, even made him disliked by his fellow students (who also made fun of his accent). He went to the military school as a lower nobleman with higher classed collegues.
He later outgrew his Corsican indepentist sympathy. Be aware that Corsica didn't ask for France to invade a few decades earlier. Especially the Corsican elites were divided on the recent French rule, not the peasant.
France was developing a standard French since the Middle Ages, by the way. Of course there also where many oïl dialects and oc dialects. There were also other minority languages like German, Dutch (yes there are writers in these standard languages, standard language are older than official spellings) a.s.o. and their peasant dialects also.
French spelling become regulated since the 18
th century, but that doesn't mean standard French didn't existed among the elites. The common people indeed didn't speak it yet. That neither mean this was the first advent of a common people to start to learn a standard language.
Many posters have pointed out that in ancient Rome many patricians spoke both Greek and Roman regularly.
In Ancient Rome, did you know, soldiers were generally able to read and write ? Standard Latin was a very strong language, and at worst was spoken in its vulgar form by common people. Only when the empire declined the language deteriorated.
While a harsh life they had, the Romans had a highly developed civilization compared to those of the Western Dark Ages. I think you are underestimating the Ancient era.
Romans took the spread of their language very seriously. It's not because they came before the Dark Ages, people didn't have official languages (or something alike). History works cyclical, not linearly.
Modern Mandarin (while predominant in china today) was a minority language that got popular at court; but China today has perhaps 20 languges with have little intercompehensibility. (there is NO language called Chinese!!)
There are even more languages in China. Nowadays Mandarin is the most dominant one. Cantonese is offereing some resistance due to Hong Kong being influential, but Mandarin seems to be winnign the plea. The Chinese government is doing its best nowadays to get as many people to speak Mandarin as possible.
Finally the USA has no official language at all!
True, but English is
de facto the 'official language'.
The point I am making is that arguments about what language was spoken by whom and where - in historical sense if largely pointless as the language you spoke did not have the cultural and political overtones of today.
Maybe in the First Millenium AD, but at wasn't always so.
Thus anyone making a stink out this language issue is, I'm sorry to say, just picking a nationalism bone and is imposing, on the past, a modern notion that simply didn't exist then. I understand some folks have a lot of national pride but seriously swallow it - and move on.
Also, civilizations (not necessarely language related) existed and nations of those as well and yes they competed with each other. That doesn't imply nationalism. It worked way more abstractly. This even went beyond language at many occasions as common people had even less of a say. Modern nationalism is indeed a recent invention.
You have to be naive to think that elite didn't care about which nation they belonged to before nationalism and they sought ways of spreading there influence. Language, as always is a powerful tool for it.
