ABSTRACT
Three of the many dialects of the ancient speech which wandering immigrants first brought to the Italian peninsula emerged as contenders for the ultimate language of the region: Umbrian, Oscan, and Latin. Latin, which was used in the comparatively small area of Latium, had been enriched by an admixture of features of local Sabine and Etruscan speech, and much more significantly by Greek. The historical Trojan War took place in about 1220 BC, and legend has it that soon afterwards Greek settlers came to Italy. Certainly there was a Greek trading post in the Bay of Naples by 775 BC, and the fifty years or so after the traditional date for the founding of Rome in 753 BC coincide with the composition of the Greek epic poems, the Odyssey and Iliad, and the establishment and circulation through the Greek world of the Greek alphabet. The domination of one dialect over another is usually due to external rather than linguistic featuresthe south-eastern dialect of English became the standard form because London, where it was spoken, was the centre of government and where the English printing industry began. In the case of Latin, it was Roman military expansion which caused it to become the first language of the Italian peninsula and the second, if not the first, wherever else Rome’s conquests lay.
