When the fall of the Roman empire came it seems its language died off with it. As i understand Italy soon after the fall became divided up into city states with their own customs and languages, and the Italian language we know today is a language that was forced upon the rest of Italy. My question is why did Latin cease to be a universal language in Italy? It seems like a common tongue would've help the land reunite much faster.
Hi there, this is not to discourage more answers to the question, but you may be interested in these past questions that have been asked on the topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3i93d6/when_did_latin_start_to_die_out/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4jrfis/is_vatican_latin_actually_latin/
To quote /u/keyilan from the first answer,
Latin didn't start to die out. Latin just became something that we gave other names to.
...
You could similarly ask when English started to die out. After all we aren't using an English anything like the English in Beowulf (to the average English speaker, at least). At what point did that stop being one language and start being another? There is no scientific answer to this, because it's all just a gradient of constantly shifting hues.
Latin didn't really "die off"; rather, it gradually morphed into various dialects of Vulgar Latin (which happened long before the fall of the Empire) which eventually evolved to become Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and others. Literary Latin continued to be widely used by monks and scholars all over Europe and yes, communication between different regions of Europe was indeed one of its purposes.
Also, Italian wasn't "forced" upon the population of Italy. This would have been quite difficult to achieve due to a lack of a central authority with the necessary resources (and interest). Literary Italian evolved gradually through the works of people like Dante Alighieri, while the common folk continued to speak their divergent regional dialects, many of which are still spoken today.
EDIT: Punctuation
When the fall of the Roman empire came it seems its language died off with it. As i understand Italy soon after the fall became divided up into city states with their own customs and languages, and the Italian language we know today is a language that was forced upon the rest of Italy
This is definitely not the case, the Italian language along with Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian are part of a group of languages called the Romance Languages. Romance meaning pertaining to Rome, not romantic. These languages descended from Latin, but a specific kind of register spoken by common generally referred to as Vulgar Latin (vulgar in latin means "of the people", not that it's full of swear words). Vulgar Latin is a heavily discussed topic because we have few records of how common people actually spoke Latin but we do know that at the very least, by 9th century CE written Latin and spoken Latin,which we may aswell call proto-French, proto-Italian etc, were no longer mutually intelligible.
The first documented modern romance language was Old French, from the Oath of Strasbourg, a document attesting the allegiance between Charles the Bald and Louis the German, who were half-brothers and grandsons to Charlemagne. In the oath it is written that Louis the Bald spoke in romana lingua (roman language) so people still identified themselves as speakers of the language of the romans. Basically the relation between Latin and Italian is the same one that Old English has with English.