Latin is not a dead language. The claim that it died with Rome is one of the more misleading things said about either Latin or Rome, and correcting it requires understanding what actually happened to the language after the Western Empire’s political structures dissolved in the fifth century. Latin did not die. It evolved, as all living languages do, into forms that its classical speakers would have had difficulty understanding. The languages that evolved from it — Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Galician, Occitan, and several others — are Latin, in the same sense that modern English is Old English: substantially transformed, but continuous. They did not replace Latin; they are Latin, moving through time.