languages of the roman empire
The language of the Romans was Latin and Vergil, the epic poet in Augustan times, put emphasis on the language saying that it was a source of unity and tradition. Until the reign of Alexander Severus, all the birth certificates and will had to be written in Latin. This language was also the language of the law courts in the West and of the military throughout the Empire. When Alexander the Great came into power, he was set to make Greek the official language of the Empire. Because of this, Greek became the shared language around the eastern Mediterranean and into Asia Minor. So this linguistic frontier between the Latin West and the Greek East stretched through the Balkan Peninsula. Romans who received an elite education had to learn Greek as a classical language. The Julio-Claudian emperors encouraged high standards of correct Latin. Claudius tried to limit the use of Greek and sometimes people's citizenship were abolished if they lacked in the Latin language. The emperor Diocletian sought to renew the authority of Latin and he acknowledged Latin as the "language of power".
local languages and linguistic legacy
People saw that other languages were spoken also such as the language Coptic that predominated the region of Egypt. Local languages like Punic, Gaulish and Aramaic were looked over by the Roman jurists to understand most of the laws and oaths of the Empire. In the province of Africa, Punic was used on the legends of coins in the time of Tiberius. The dominance however of Latin to the Roman elite may have obscured the spoken languages since all the cultures in the Roman Empire were mostly oral. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Latin branched into what we know as Romance languages. These include Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. Latin itself also continued for law and for the Roman Catholic Church up to present day. Linguistic distribution in the East was more complicating even though Greek still survived as the official language. Greek, Latin and the Thracian languages were all part of the Indo-European origin.