Why is Latin America Called Latin America
How Latin Shaped a Continent, a Language Legacy, and the Meaning Behind ‘Latin America
The people aren’t from Rome, so I was curious as to the start of this term. It turns out it’s a relatively recent name, first introduced in 1856 at the Initiative of the Americas: Idea for a Federal Congress of the Republics in Paris. It was chosen to unite countries that spoke the Romance languages, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian. Although mainly Spanish and Portuguese in this case.
The term became more widespread during the 1860s when France invaded Mexico. Framing Mexico as part of “Latin America” helped justify French involvement by presenting it as support for a “Latin family of nations” against the growing influence of the U.S. and Britain. Eventually France was defeated, one of the main battles Mexico won is now celebrated as Cinco de Mayo as Puebla was defended and helped boost Mexican morale.
Also, why did Romans speak Latin and not Roman? Rome was in a region of Italy called Latium. The region had a couple hundred thousand people around 1000 BC. Due to pure circumstance with the establishment and expansion of the Roman Empire, the Latin language, while dead itself, spawned around 1 billion people worldwide. It’s also the universal scholarly language, used in science and academics, partly from tradition from medieval universities but also because it’s a dead language, the meaning and uses of words will never change.
By the 7th to 9th century CE, Latin had been replaced by the development of newer romance languages. It had a long run, over 2000 years, but several other languages managed to reach the 3000 year hurdle, namely ancient Egyption, Sumerian, Chinese (in written form), Greek, and Hebrew, although Hebrew went mostly unspoken for about 800 years before brought back into use in the 19th century. Tamil is the oldest language that is still spoken, with modern speakers still able to understand texts over 2500 years old.