Did Barbarians speak Latin? What language did they speak???

Answer 1

No, they spoke Barbarian.

Answer 2

Different cultures have called their neighbors barbarians. The Greeks called any non-Greeks barbarians - and that was before the Latin language existed. The Romans generally considered the Germanic Tribes, as well as the Celts and Huns to be barbarians. The Chinese built the Great Wall to keep out Barbarians. Europeans considered the Native Americans to be barbarians and savages. Basically Barbarians are anyone who is not the from your culture who you want to feel superior to.

Answer 3

Your mention of Latin suggests that you mean the barbarians in relation to the Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire. Those who overran and replaced the empire in the fifth century spoke a variety of Germanic Languages - Frankish, Gothic, Anglo-saxon and so on.
However, people inside the empire also counted as barbarians if they were unable to speak Latin or Greek.
We have remains of several Germanic barbarian languages, especially Anglo-saxon. A strange thing about Anglo-Saxon is it is so different that it seems to have split off from the others long before the Anglo-Saxon descent on Britain. Recent research suggests that the 'Belgic' inhabitants of Briatain spoke a sort of proto-Anglo-Saxon even before the Romans.

Answer 4

They each spoke their own language, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Huns, Franks. Barbarians increasingly learned Latin because of an exchange of hostages. In those days, hostage truly meant a guest "hosted" by someone. Romans and barbarians sent high-born children at young ages to be fostered by the other people.

While the Visigoths still lived north of the Danube and had not entered the Roman Empire, one of them, Ulfilas, was sent as hostage to Constantinople. He converted to Christianity, translated the Bible into Visigothic, and returned to convert his people. (I mention that to show that sometimes one had to use Latin and sometimes a barbarian's own language.) Because of his influence, all of the barbarian nations that entered the empire were already Christians except Franks and Huns. But the Christianity that Ulfilas adopted was Arianism (that of Arius, ~300), later declared heretical and therefore hated by orthodox Latin Christians (we might say Catholics.")

Answer 5

You are assuming that the ‘barbarians’ were one people but you will find that over time lots of people have been called that. It just depended on who was doing the name calling. Most likely, most of them spoke a language all their own and those languages differed from other groups that were called ‘barbarians’.

Answer 6

By barbarians you are covering a lot of ground . the word barbarian was given by civilised peoples for other tribes that
they considerd were not civalized Gauls,Goths ,Vandals,Celts,Saxsons,Pics,
ScotsVikingsAngles, Mongols.Danes,Jutes,Slav,Franks,Huns,Sarmatians,Burgundii
Lombardi,Ostrogoths,Roxolani all these and many more were considerd Barbarian , they all spoke there own language a ancient form of germanic, french, russian scandanavion,duch,manderin, urdu, some germanic tribes could also speak Latin because of there close ties with Rome

Answer 7

The Romans (Latin speakers of course) labelled people who *didn't* speak Latin as uncouth and "barbarians". This comes from the "bur-bur bur-bur" sound that non-Latin sounded like to the Romans.

So, "barbarians" could have come from *anywhere* and simply spoke their own (non-Latin) language.

Answer 8

who are you referring to as the Barbarians? Attila was from Hungary i believe, Gingus Khan was from Mongolia, and the Celts and Saxons were also called barbarians, so geographic relations mean a lot. the Knights of the crusade were barbarians according to the Islam people its all relative

Answer 9

what barbarians? peoples mentioned in latin texts spoke various languages unrelated to latin. some of these included etruscan, raetic, iberian, tartessian, etc. all of these languages were spoken before the roman expansion and are completely unrelated to latin and the indo-european language family.

Answer 10

Barbarians were named by the Greeks. It means to stutter or stammer.

Here's a website:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian

Answer 11

You first need to define barbarians.To the Romans they were Gauls,Turks and several other etnic tribes,all speaking different languages.There are still tribes in the world (New Zealand,Phillipines)that are cannibals.We would consider them barbarians