If Latin is such an influential language on so many of our languages today, how is it so it could fall?

it died because it evolved into different langauges. spanish, italian, portuguese, etc, effectively ARE latin in the modern world.

It didn’t “fall,” it simply evolved, in the many, many regions in which it was spoken. The fact that it was taken so far and that it did give birth to several daughter tongues (and even influenced non-Romance languages) is proof of its importance.

Classical Latin, by the way, was the not vernacular spoken by common people. The evidence of the evolution of the Italian tongue from Latin, via many Latin dialects, can be seen as early as the 1st century CE.

Classical Latin was still the language of educated people until the Early Modern period, and it is still taught in schools and universities today — for good reason. Many people on this site would benefit from the grammar lessons and the understanding of the flexibility of language that Latin can provide.

I just recently read a great book about this called ‘Latin, or the Empire of a Sign.’ You will come away from it knowing anything and everything you want to know about the decline of Latin.

Some people argue that Latin never did really die, it simply morphed into modern Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. These languages have vocabularies that are about 90 to 95% Latin in origin.

However, Classical or Imperial Latin probably vanished because the pure Roman Patrician class produced fewer and fewer offspring to the point where the original Roman blood lines were stretched pretty thin by the 2nd century A.D.

For example, three of the most famous Roman emperors of the 2nd century A.D. came from Spain and probably had ancestry that was more Phoenecian or Celtiberian than Roman.

Malaria was also a big killer of people in the ancient world to in both Greece and Rome and that might also have depleted the Roman population quite a bit.

Nevertheless, because the Romans conquered and subjugated so many people in Europe in earlier times, a variation of Latin called “Vulgar Latin” continued to survive. By 500 A.D. it had developed into the earliest forms of Italian, Spanish, French and Romanian (or Rumanian).

If history had taken a different course, we might all be speaking Semitic today and making human sacrifices to Baal. However, Rome’s defeat of Carthage in 206 B.C. ensured that Latin would become the dominant language of Europe and Western civilization.

English is still basically an Anglo-Saxon or Germanic language but it has a large Latin component because of Rome’s defeat of Carthage long ago. It’s that old saying about “the winner takes all” and the Romans were the winners in the struggle with the North African city of Carthage for empire. Consequently, English is supplemented with a lot of Latin instead of Phoenecian (or Semitic).