No Stupid Questions

In the context of biblical history, I've heard that, because of the Alexandrian empire and it's 3-4 off-shoot kingdoms, Greek was actually the 'Lingua Franca' (default language for international communication) throughout the middle east; from before the Romans arrived, to Jesus's time, to until after the Roman empire split in two for good.

I guess it is hard to supplant an existing Lingua Franca. France today is a good example - they are very defensive of their language, once the Standard Internationale, and so France sees less English speakers proportionally than other European countries such as Spain, Nederland and Germany.

So... The middle East's dominant languages were Greek and Persian, Greek and Persian, Greek and Persian - then Muhammed shows up with Islam, and they conquer surrounding states. Arabic is spreading. And this is testament to Persia's linguistic domination, right - Arabic calligraphy comes from the Persian alphabet. That's bonkers; a group of people, B, subjugated by A, manages to get A to assume their script for all writing.

At that point, the whole(-ish) middle east now had a different alphabet - neither greek nor Roman - to write in. Languages don't tend to change their script once they've settled on one. The only examples I know are Poland, who did it because of catholic church's influence , and Mongolia, who were forced to by the soviet union; it doesn't happen naturally. Oh also Turkey, which was again a government mandate.

Certain scripts are better for certain language sounds; I don't expect Arabic will ever be written in Latin script in general practice. It didn't spread at first because Greek was already so dominant, then because the catholic church wast spreading into Muslim territories in the middle east, and now because it is not Lingua Franca, languages have settled on the correct scripts, and Christianity isn't spreading in the middle east, same as usual.

So Latin spread pretty well across Europe, being the basis of almost every language there

That is agross overstatement. Latin is not the basis for the Germanic, Slavic, Gaelic and Uralic language families, nor for Greek and Basque. Together those are a lot more languages than there are Latin descendants in Europe.

the roman administration in the east relied on greek, which was well established as an administrative language by alexander and his successors. cleopatra e.g. was a ptolemaic, greek queen.

Latin is really interesting in its history. While it was a very large part of Roman culture and certainly still influences other languages today, it was mostly an Italian thing during the Empire. Romans from the Italian peninsula and, later on, the provinces closer to Italy, were the primary speakers of Latin in day to day use. Outside of that, the language was quite widespread, but was more of an administrative language, as others have said.

With imperial Rome's penchant for integrating/melding itself with conquered cultures, and the influence of Latin through the Roman Catholic Church in the middle ages, Romance languages of Europe can really be seen more as expressions of Latin through different existing linguistic traditions.

I have heard that in some ways, Spanish is one of the closer varieties to Imperial Latin as, between the Roman conquering of the Iberian tribes and the eventual invasion of the Visigoths during the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it was one of the most culturally and administratively stable regions of the empire with much of its population being quite proud to consider themselves a part of the empire. Two of the more famous emperors, Trajan and Hadrian were both from Hispania and the region was seen as somewhat of a model province. When the Germanic Visigoths took over, they were already dealing with a pretty strong linguistic tradition in the region.

French is sort of another Germanic take on Latin. The Franks really started picking up Latin in the middle ages. Like the majority of Europe, the Franks brought Latin influences in primarily through Christianization and Roman Catholicism's power structure, prestige, and connection to the somewhat mythical days of the empire.

Both of these languages evolved from continual and persistent contact with a conquering empire and religious structure where Latin was seen as a connection to power and importance. Latin's place in other European languages comes largely from those connections as well and I would say, the strongest connections come from the religious framework of the Catholic Church.

The Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire, by contrast, had already been leaning more heavily into Greek language and culture, even from the earlier days of the empire. This is mostly due to geography and preexisting cultures, but also due to the Eastern Empire's ability to operate more like it had before the split. As they controlled the wealthier and more productive provinces, Byzantine rulers initially had more resources at their disposal and less of a need to create/capitalize on the mythological prestige of an old imperial language and religious structure to bring together disparate peoples.

Instead of promoting a more cohesive cultural/religious framework with outside civilizations, rulers in the East relied more on wealth and payment to pit rivals against each other or just bribe warlords to go away for a while. This would eventually lead to the slow retreat of Eastern borders and the conquest of important provinces by the more unified Arabs and Turks as allies became harder to find and the money ran out.

Basically, by the time Latin resurfaced as a prestigious language in Western Europe, it had already been largely abandoned in the surviving Eastern Roman Empire. With less linguistic tradition of Latin in the region, the cultures that took over after the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire did not need to engage with the language much past scholarly curiosity, and even then, most of the important works were already written in Greek to begin with.

I would argue that due to the nature of the Roman Empire, Latin struggled to spread (especially Eastward and Northward) even during its heyday and was largely resurrected as an administrative language in Western Europe due to Germanic warlords wanting to have a connection to past glories of the Roman Empire and the potentially lucrative economic system of the Roman Church. It really is amazing how far it has reached linguistically since then. We still collectively treat it with reverence in academic and legal contexts millennia after it was spoken in day to day usage.

Lots of great comments in here (I've really enjoyed it all, so great question!)

If you decide to dig in a little deeper, there's a great podcast called The History English Podcast by Kevin Stroud.

While it's the history of English, since you can't separate English from Latin (plus the other PIE languages) nor from history itself, he ends up covering a lot of general history and languages.

The History of English Podcast

In short: Administrative pragmatism meant that Latin never took as much hold in the east as it did in the west.

The central influence of Rome was constrained by a fundamental difficulty of premodern logistics and communication: When the fastest way to deliver a message on land is "messenger on horseback" and the only way to move large armies is along major routes in well-populated territory you can ~~plunder~~ "acquire" food from, the ability to effectively administer a region diminishes with distance. Naval transport and supply can extended that range, to the degree that territories are navigable. Thus, it is essential to have local structures to facilitate administration.

In western and middle Europe, such structures were largely absent, so Rome had to build its own, more or less by transplantation of Roman (educated) citizens via land grants to soldiers, creating a local military reserve and elite that could enforce Rome's laws. However, Rome rarely bothered to stamp out local customs or enforce a strict cultural dominance: Whatever kept the locals content and compliant was good enough. This wasn't progressive respect or inclusion or anything, just a pragmatic way to save on manpower.

That led to a form of bidirectional cultural blending: Romans would adopt customs from those around them, while those seeking social status would adopt customs and learn the language of the Roman administration (particularly if they hoped to become citizens themselves). This blending of cultures and identities meant that, even as Rome's central power crumbled, the emerging local elites still spoke Latin, or some locally flavoured variant thereof.

In the east and south, the Macedonian conquest and successor states had already established an administrative system, staffed with a strongly separated Greek-speaking upper class. The same pragmatism that had led to the laissez a faire approach in Europe led to instead taking over the existing system, including Greek as dominant administrative language.

The Roman Empire was eventually separated into two sub-empires, each with their own subordinate emperor, because a single administration became unfeasible due to various conflicts and the sheer size of it. As the western half started collapsing, the eastern empire almost exclusively used Greek for official matters, eventually supplanting local languages. However, it had to contend with (and lost some land to) the Arab Empire, which brought its own family of semitic languages, then eventually fell to the Ottoman Empire, which also brought its own Turkish languages.

To sum it up, the reason it spread across Europe is the fact that it was a valuable language to learn for social and political reasons, while the reason it didn't spread in the east is the existing of structures that made learning it obsolete, and its stand-in (Greek) didn't survive the assault of other, powerful empires with enough administrative capacity to impose their own language.

The Levantine areas were controlled by the Eastern Roman Empire which used Greek as the main language. Plus, Greek had been spoken in some form or another since Alexander invaded centuries earlier. The only time Latin may have been used in the region was during the Crusades when European settlers began arriving

The Empire in the West basically shattered all pre-Roman forms of social organization, turning everyone into Roman citizens/subjects. This didn't happen in the East, so they protected local language and culture from being subsumed by Greek (not Latin, as other comments have said). I'm only parroting this from when I asked the sam question so don't ask me why this happened.

If we replace Latin with Greek, I'd say that the European areas were either just never conquered for long enough periods by people with different languages, or the conquerors weren't enough (or not brutal enough) to enforce the spread of their own language; e.g. the Franks conquered Vulgar Latin-speaking France, but they adopted the Latin-based language instead of making everyone else speak a Germanic language. Closely related to that is that Europe was almost fully christianized, which is heavily based on the Latin and Greek languages, while the middle east was almost fully (muslimized? islamized? there's got to be a word for that).

So Latin spread pretty well across Europe, being the basis of almost every language there

Maybe a third, by population. Germanic and slavic languages are a thing, they aren't based on Latin even if they use many Latin loan words.

When I first started taking high school Latin, I thought any language with such an arcane grammar deserved to die. Later, I joked with a linguist about how I was so relieved modern romance languages like French have abandoned all that, and he said "Well, we still have Romanian." Now, I live in horror of visiting eastern Europe.

So Latin spread pretty well across Europe, being the basis of almost every language there

I'm assuming you're referring to the Latin alphabet? Because the entire Germanic language family was not based on Latin.

being the basis of almost every language there,

That is simply not true.

Only for these 6 you can call it the basis: Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese, Romanian, Moldovan. It has also influenced English a lot.

That makes 280 mill people in Europe having one of these as their native language.

And then there are about 435 mill people in Europe who have one of the 35 other European languages as their native language.

(Data source: Google AI)

It kinda did but it was supplanted by Arabic.