- It is believed there was an African Romance language in the former Roman colonies, in Latino-Punic Epigraphy: A Descriptive Study of the Inscriptions 69n162 Robert M. Kerr writes:
- In any case, the first century BC is much too early to posit any form of ‘Africitas.’ Romance only becomes distinct in the latter second half of the first millennium AD (i.e. parts of the Strasbourg Oaths of 842 render a form of Romance (and not French) – alongside Latin and Old High German – cf. Illo 1999), for which in Africa hardly any material has survived (e.g. IRT 262: 14, epitaphs, of which four are dated to the tenth century, and one to the eleventh)
- This is really more of a discussion of “Africitas” – a distinct dialect of Latin that emerged in North Africa, about whose existence there was some lively historical and linguistic debate – which if it existed (which it probably did) would have been the precursor to an African Romance language. You can read about that in Is There An Africitas? and The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC – AD 600 516, where Adams writes:
- We have already seen testimonia which show that in antiquity itself African Latin was perceived as having distinctive characteristics. If one looks beyond the high literary texts discussed by Sittl and others as supposedly exemplifying Africitas to more mundane works such as medical texts and non-literary documents, one finds that it is indeed possible to attribute certain texts to Africa on linguistic grounds, and to identify some of the features of the local Latin.
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/4389237?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
- It’s been suggested by Maarten Kossmann in “Loanwords in Tarafiyt, a Berber Language of Morocco” in Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook that several loanwords in Berber languages with Latin derivation are in fact from North African Romance. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of evidence to attest to North African Romance in a written form, so it’s hard to tell the range of the romance language or how long it lasted, or even if the local population saw it distinct from “Latin” in any real sense, which continued in use with the coming of the Vandals and under the Umayyad Caliphate .
- According to Jonathan Conant’s Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439-700 (2012), a Latinate language in Africa continued to be spoken far beyond the Arab conquests:
- Only slowly were the two great languages of elite Roman cultural identity, Latin and Greek, replaced by Arabic. For hundreds of years after the conquest, Afariqa [ex-Roman inhabitants of North Africa] continued to speak a dialect of Latin that al-Idrisi (ad 1100–c.1165) called al-latini al-afriqi or ‘African Latin’. This dialect was spoken in Gafsa into the twelfth century at least. As an epigraphic language it is attested both in Kairouan and in the region of Tripoli down to the eleventh century.