question: Why don’t modern day Italians speak Latin?
comment: Latin became several different languages, which we collectively call the "Romance Languages" today - Spanish, French, Portugese, Italian, Romanian, etc. It definitely didn't change uniformly in one direction - it changed in several different directions as areas that were formerly under Roman influence slowly developed separately from each other. Any groups that are divided from each other will eventually change the way that they speak, and modern Italian is just one of many directions in which that language evolved - although it happens to be the one they speak in the modern city of Rome. On top of that, Italian isn't even really a single language! Tuscan, Sicilian, Corsican, Venetian, there are several languages in the Italian family that are distinctive enough to be considered their own languages that are still spoken today to some degree. Standard Italian, though, is spoken throughout the country and is generally considered the closest to Vulgar Latin. And of course, Vulgar (or common) Latin was a different version of the spoken language that developed among the Roman population well after the "Classical Latin" that was most commonly written and which many of us studied in school, so there isn't really one "Latin" either. No single language survives too long in history!
passages: Concerning Italy, doubtless there were divers before the Latin did spread all over that Country; the Calabrian, and Apulian spoke Greek, whereof some Relicks are to be found to this day; but it was an adventitious, no Mother-Language to them: 'tis confess'd that Latium it self, and all the Territories about Rome, had the Latin for its maternal and common first vernacular Tongue; but Tuscany and Liguria had others quite discrepant, viz. the Hetruscane and Mesapian, whereof though there be some Records yet extant; yet there are none alive that can understand them: The Oscan, the Sabin and Tusculan, are thought to be but Dialects to these.
   This dialect has brought all borrowed words under its own laws of accidence; but its original vocabulary has been hopelessly impoverished and deprived of its finest elements. A Corfiote Jew visiting any part of Apulia would have found difficulty in understanding the spoken vernacular or the songs of the natives, although the grammatical structure is exactly the same as that of his own dialect.
   In some cases, colonies were established where variants of regional languages of Italy were used, and some continue to use this regional language. Examples are Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where Talian is used, and the town of Chipilo near Puebla, Mexico; each continues to use a derived form of Venetian dating back to the nineteenth century. Another example is Cocoliche, an Italian–Spanish pidgin once spoken in Argentina and especially in Buenos Aires, and Lunfardo.
  
  Section::::Geographic distribution.:Lingua franca.
   During the 13th century a French chronicler who traveled through Calabria stated that "the peasants of Calabria spoke nothing but Greek" given he had traveled to areas where Greek was still available. But the educated classes spoke Italian. Indeed, formal Italian has been taught in schools throughout Italy for nearly two centuries, causing the ancient languages and dialects to continually disappear, much to the chagrin of the cultural community. These lost dialects continue to thrive to this day in North America and Australia, places where Italians emigrated to, on account of the Diaspora.
  
  Section::::Economy.
   The emergence of identifiable Italian dialects from Vulgar Latin, and as such the possibility of a specifically "Italian" ethnic identity, has no clear-cut date, but takes place from roughly 12th century. Modern standard Italian derives from the written vernacular of Tuscan writers of the 12th century.
  
  The recognition of Italian vernaculars as literary languages in their own right begins with 
  
  "De vulgari eloquentia", an essay written by Dante Alighieri at the beginning of the 14th century.
   Italian became the language used in the courts of every state in the Italian peninsula. The rediscovery of Dante's and a renewed interest in linguistics in the 16th century, sparked a debate that raged throughout Italy concerning the criteria that should govern the establishment of a modern Italian literary and spoken language. This discussion, known as (i. e., the "problem of the language"), ran through the Italian culture until the end of the 19th century, often linked to the political debate on achieving a united Italian state. Renaissance scholars divided into three main factions:
   The first known grammar of a Romance language was a book written in manuscript form by Leon Battista Alberti between 1437 and 1441 and entitled "Grammatica della lingua toscana", "Grammar of the Tuscan Language." In it Alberti sought to demonstrate that the vernacular – here Tuscan, known today as modern Italian – was every bit as structured as Latin. He did so by mapping vernacular structures onto Latin.
   Starting in late medieval times in much of Europe and the Mediterranean, Latin was replaced as the primary commercial language by Italian language variants (especially Tuscan and Venetian). These variants were consolidated during the Renaissance with the strength of Italy and the rise of humanism and the arts.
   This is significant once it is considered that the Italian state began its life in 1861 without a common language. Most of the population could not speak, what is today considered, Italian. Out of a population of 35 million at least 31 million were not included in the, not-so, common language.
   There are only a few communities in Italy in which Italian is not spoken as the first language, but many speakers are native bilinguals of both standardised Italian and other regional languages. These include native communities of Indo-European languages like Albanian, Croatian and Greek in southern Italy, Slovene and German varieties in Northern Italy, and dozens of various Romance languages, like Arpitan, Catalan, Friulan, Ladin, Lombard, Neapolitan, Occitan, Sardinian, Sicilian, and many others.
   The standard Italian language has a poetic and literary origin in the writings of Tuscan writers of the 12th century, and, even though the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13th century, the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Romance vernacular as language spoken in the Apennine peninsula has a longer history. In fact, the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called vernacular (as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae known as the Placiti Cassinesi from the Province of Benevento that date from 960–963, although the Veronese Riddle, probably from the 8th or early 9th century, contains a late form of Vulgar Latin that can be seen as a very early sample of a vernacular dialect of Italy.
   Italian literature's first modern novel, "I promessi sposi" (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni, further defined the standard by "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters of the Arno" (Florence's river), as he states in the preface to his 1840 edition.
   Italian, like English, belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. Like French and Spanish, it is a Romance language, one of the modern languages that developed from Latin. In particular, among the Romance languages, Italian is considered to be the closest to Latin in terms of vocabulary. It is spoken by about 60 million people in Italy, 23,000 in the Republic of San Marino, 400,000 in Switzerland, another 1,3 million in other European countries, and approximately 6 million in the Americas.
   Around 180, the Latin author Aulus Gellius mentions Etruscan alongside the Gaulish language in an anecdote. Freeman notes that although Gaulish was clearly still alive during Gellius' time, his testimony may not indicate that Etruscan was still alive because the phrase could indicate a meaning of the sort of "it's all Greek (incomprehensible) to me".
   The Jews can boast of having preserved the oldest text in the Apulian dialect, a collection of translations of Hebrew dirges dating from the thirteenth century and now in the British Museum (MS. Or. 6276). It contains many obsolete terms which are very close to the Latin and many of the older and fuller grammatical forms. Among its points of interest are words and phrases such as "tamen sollicitatevi" (="mind"), "etiam Ribbi Ismahel", "lu coriu" (="skin"), "di la carni sua", "la ostia" (="army"), and "di li cieli." In the fourteenth century the decay of Apulian in Corfu had so far advanced that readers were no longer able to pronounce correctly the words of this Hebrew manuscript or to grasp their meanings. Vowel-points were accordingly inserted, but very inaccurately; and later an incompetent scribe incorrectly substituted "duzzini" (= "dozens"), "douzelli" (= "young men"), "macchina" (= "machine") for "magina" (= "image"), and attempted to erase the superlative termination of "grandissima." It was perhaps owing to the influence of the Venetian Veneto da mar that he spared all the simple futures; but in four or five places where the pronoun of the first person was erased the substituted words have so thoroughly obliterated the original readings that it is impossible to discover what was the old form of the peculiar "joni" which is now used side by side with "jò."
   BULLET::::- The purists, headed by Venetian Pietro Bembo (who, in his "Gli Asolani", claimed the language might be based only on the great literary classics, such as Petrarch and some part of Boccaccio). The purists thought the Divine Comedy was not dignified enough because it used elements from non-lyric registers of the language.
  
  BULLET::::- Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentines preferred the version spoken by ordinary people in their own times.
  
  BULLET::::- The courtiers, like Baldassare Castiglione and Gian Giorgio Trissino, insisted that each local vernacular contribute to the new standard.
   There is no definitive date when the various Italian variants of Latin—including varieties that contributed to modern Standard Italian—began to be distinct enough from Latin to be considered separate languages. One criterion for determining that two language variants are to be considered separate languages rather than variants of a single language is that they have evolved so that they are no longer mutually intelligible; this diagnostic is effective if mutual intelligibility is minimal or absent (e.g. in Romance, Romanian and Portuguese), but it fails in cases such as Spanish-Portuguese or Spanish-Italian, as native speakers of either pairing can understand each other well if they choose to do so. Nevertheless, on the basis of accumulated differences in morphology, syntax, phonology, and to some extent lexicon, it is not difficult to identify that for the Romance varieties of Italy, the first extant written evidence of languages that can no longer be considered Latin comes from the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. These written sources demonstrate certain vernacular characteristics and sometimes explicitly mention the use of the vernacular in Italy. Full literary manifestations of the vernacular began to surface around the 13th century in the form of various religious texts and poetry.Although these are the first written records of Italian varieties separate from Latin, the spoken language had likely diverged long before the first written records appear, since those who were literate generally wrote in Latin even if they spoke other Romance varieties in person.
   Roman domination shaped dialects spoken in ancient Lombardy, such that lexicon and grammar of this language find their origin in the Latin language. This influence was not yet homogeneous; idioms of different areas were influenced by previous linguistic substrata and each area was marked by a stronger or weaker characterisation in comparison to Ligure or ancient Celtic languages.
   Italian is a Romance language, and is therefore a descendant of Vulgar Latin (the spoken form of non-classical Latin). Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, especially its Florentine dialect, and is therefore an Italo-Dalmatian language, to which Sicilian and the extinct Dalmatian also belong, among a few others.
   The continual advancements in technology plays a crucial role in the diffusion of languages. After the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the number of printing presses in Italy grew rapidly and by the year 1500 reached a total of 56, the biggest number of printing presses in all of Europe. This allowed to produce more pieces of literature at a lower cost and as the dominant language, Italian spread.
  
  Section::::History.:Modern era.
   The differences in the evolution of Latin in the different regions of Italy can be attributed to the presence of three other types of languages: substrata, superstrata, and adstrata. The most prevalent were substrata (the language of the original inhabitants), as the Italian dialects were most likely simply Latin as spoken by native cultural groups. Superstrata and adstrata were both less important. Foreign conquerors of Italy that dominated different regions at different times left behind little to no influence on the dialects. Foreign cultures with which Italy engaged in peaceful relations with, such as trade, had no significant influence either.
   Since the times of the Renaissance, a trans-Italian language was developed in central Italy, based on Florentine Tuscan; in light of its cultural prestige, it started to be employed for formal, literary and written purposes among the literate classes from the various states of mainland Italy, Sicily and Corsica (France), sidelining the other dialects in education and formal settings. Thus, literary Florentine established itself as the single most representative dialect of Italy long before its political unification in 1861, Tuscan having been officially adopted by the preunitarian states. Italian further expanded as a commonly spoken linguistic form for everyday use throughout the country after World War II. 
   Due to heavy Italian influence during the Italian colonial period, Italian is still understood by some in former colonies. Although it was the primary language in Libya since colonial rule, Italian greatly declined under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, who expelled the Italian Libyan population and made Arabic the sole official language of the country. A few hundred Italian settlers returned to Libya in the 2000s; today Italian is the most spoken second language in the country and serves as a language of commerce and sometimes as a "lingua franca" between Libyans and foreigners. In Eritrea, Italian is at times used in commerce and the capital city Asmara still has one Italian-language school. Italian was also introduced to Somalia through colonialism and was the sole official language of administration and education during the colonial period but fell out of use after government, educational and economic infrastructure were destroyed in the Somali Civil War.
   Unlike the neighbouring island of Corsica (France) and elsewhere in today's Italy, where Italian was the standard language shared by the various local elites since the late Middle Ages, Italian was first officially introduced to Sardinia, to the detriment of both Spanish and Sardinian (the only surviving Neo-Latin language from the Southern branch), only in 1760 and 1764 by the then-ruling House of Savoy, from Piedmont. Because of the promotion and enforcement of the Italian language and culture upon the Sardinian population since then, the majority of the locals switched over to such politically dominant language and no longer speak their native ones, which have seen steady decline in use. The language has been in fact severely compromised to the point that only 13℅ of the children are able to speak it, and today is mostly kept as a heritage language. With the exception of a few sparsely populated areas where Sardinian can still be heard for everyday purposes, the island's indigenous languages have by now been therefore largely absorbed into Italian; the language contact ultimately resulted in the emergence of a specific variety of Italian, slightly divergent from the standard one.
   During the boom of interest in linguistic diversity during the 19th century, a number of efforts were made to create vocabularies, grammars, and collections of axioms, folk tales, and literature. The first dictionary was compiled in 1901 by Gaspare Ungarelli, who also attempted to create a writing system using the Italian alphabet. A period of stigmatisation followed in the 20th century, where children were punished for speaking the dialect in school, as it was considered to be a sign of poor education and etiquette.
  
raw_presuppositions: Modern day Italians don't speak Latin. Italians who first started speaking Latin could have passed the language down to modern day Italians.
raw_corrections: Modern day Italians speak one of many Latin variants. Latin has evolved over the years into many offshoot languages, including Italian.