Let’s get this thread active again with a discussion of historical linguistics. What was the world of language like in, say, the year 1400 CE?
once I realised how much I’d bit off, I was too far in
Celtic languages had taken a severe hit during the Roman domination of Europe, being almost expunged from the continental landmass, in which they had once been very widespread. However, Middle Breton was still being spoken as a low-status language in, obviously, Britanny. In England, also, Common Brittonic had long since been replaced, first partially by Latin and then by Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons. Instead of going extinct, though, it had evolved into a number of daughter languages. In Cornwall, Middle Cornish was spoken but was apparently already in decline. In Wales, Early Modern Welsh was in use; and the people of the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea spoke in Manx. There was a fairly large speakership of Scots Gaelic in northwest Scotland, and Early Modern Irish was thriving in Ireland.
Old English, under the oppression of a Francophone elite, had evolved into Middle English and the related languages (or dialects) of Early Scots in Scotland and Yola in Ireland. In scope it was a lesser language than its Germanic cousin Old Norse, which spanned a large area containing Denmark, Scandinavia and Iceland. Middle Dutch dialects were being spoken in the Netherlands, Old Frisian around Belgium and, to the east, Early New High German and other German languages.
Around the beginning of the Medieval period, ca. 700 CE or so, Latin ceased to be a spoken language in most situations and split into many languages and dialects spread throughout Europe and even Africa. The most northerly of the Romance languages, or language groups, was French, which was then much more diverse. Anglo-Norman was, as stated, the language of England’s ruling class, but Norman languages such as Jèrriais were also spoken on the Channel Islands. In Northern France other languages of the same Oïl group dominated, such as Picard, Walloon, and Middle French itself. In southern France, meanwhile, Occitan was spoken.
On the Iberian peninsula Old Spanish was transitioning into Middle Spanish, alongside Old Portuguese and Catalan. In Italy, of course, various dialects of Italian were spoken, as well as the more distantly-related Sicilian on Sicily. In the eastern Mediterranean, Medieval Greek persisted in the Byzantine Empire, preserving one of the world’s oldest and most productive literary traditions, that would soon kickstart the Renaissance. Old Hungarian and Basque continued to the odd men out of European linguistics. Yiddish would also have been heard in Europe at this time. Romani was not yet attested and may not have entered the continent. In the east were Slavic languages, most obviously Russian and Old Polish, with Church Slavonic being an important literary language.
The most southerly Romance language was perhaps the mysterious African Romance, but this may have already become extinct. The dominant language of Mediterranean Africa was Arabic, a relative newcomer to the region; a descendant language, Maltese, existed on Malta. It existed alongside the incumbent Berber languages, such as Tifinagh, which were also spoken on the Canary Islands. In Egypt, the native Coptic had already gone extinct and would not be revived until the 19th century (and even then, only in liturgical use). Amharic was spoken in Ethiopia. In Subsaharan Africa a wide variety of languages were, and still are, spoken, most notably from the Khoisan, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo groups (which includes the Bantu languages). Likely Swahili, a Bantu language, was already being used as a lingua franca in East Africa. Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, is an Austronesian language unrelated to any other on the continent.
Travelling east, now, in addition to the continued presence of Arabic we find Syriac and other Aramaic languages being spoken in the Middle East, as well as Persian dialects. Turkic languages spread from Anatolia deep into Central Asia, with Ottoman Turkish becoming the administrative language of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman Turkish was heavily imbued with Persian and Arabic loanwords, which comprised most of its vocabulary.
In northern India Hindi was, as today, dominant – the Persianised dialect Urdu did not yet exist. Starting in the 13th century Sanskrit had heavily declined and was possibly extinct as a conversational tongue; Pali continued its role as the language of Buddhist literature. Prakrits derived from Sanskrit such as Bengali and Marathi were also spoken at this time. Modern Tamil, an unrelated language, was widespread in South India and Sri Lanka.
Further east still, Modern Mongolian was already being spoken, with no clear relation to its linguistic neighbours. Passing the steppes, we enter the Far East or Orient proper, where we encounter Tibetan, Cantonese, and Mandarin; Hokkien seems not to yet exist. In South East Asia there existed Ancient Vietnamese, Middle Khmer, and Old Burmese, as well as Malay. It is impossible to say what exact languages were spoken on the Pacific islands, including New Zealand, except that they were of the Austronesian group. In Australia there were a wide variety of aboriginal languages; in the modern day, this diversity is heavily skewed towards the north of Australia, with much of the landmass dominated by the Pama-Nyungan group.
Pre-Columbian America had a large number of indigenous languages. In the Arctic, Inuit languages were prevalent; further south, the Algonquian languages such as Ojibwe and Cree. The dominant language of Mesoamerica was Nahuatl, speech of the Aztecs and related peoples, which coexisted with the Mayan languages. Taíno was the common tongue ot the Caribbean. Now to sneak away before anyone notices I left out the mess that is the languages of South America…