Romanization (cultural)

[citation needed] Acculturation proceeded from the top down, with the upper classes adopting Roman culture first and the old ways lingering longest among peasants in outlying countryside and rural areas.

[1] Hostages played an important part in this process, as elite children, from Mauretania to Gaul, were taken to be raised and educated in Rome.

Until Trajan, colonies were created by using retired veteran soldiers, mainly from the Italian peninsula, who promoted Roman customs and laws, with the use of Latin.

Because of this function, the promotion of a town to the status of "Colonia civium Romanorum" implied that all citizens received full citizen rights and dedicated a temple to the Capitoline triad: Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the deities venerated in the temple of Jupiter Best and Biggest on the Capitol in Rome.

[6] Brian Campbell also states "From 49 to 32 BCE about 420,000 Italians were recruited", which would thus be the veteran (citizen) stock that was largely sent to the provinces (colonies) during Augustus.

[8] The last record of spoken Gaulish deemed to be plausibly credible[8] was when Gregory of Tours wrote in the 6th century (c. 560–575) that a shrine in Auvergne which "is called Vasso Galatae in the Gallic tongue" was destroyed and burnt to the ground.

This thought process, fueled though it was by early 20th century standards of imperialism and cultural change, forms the basis for the modern understanding of Romanization.

However, recent scholarship has devoted itself to providing alternate models of how native populations adopted Roman culture and has questioned the extent to which it was accepted or resisted.

[22] Roman names were adopted by some, and the Latin language was spread, which was greatly facilitated by the fact that many cultures were mostly oral (particularly for the Gauls and Iberians).

Moreover, in the eastern half of the Empire, Latin had to compete with Greek, which largely kept its position as lingua franca and even spread to new areas.

Bernward Tewes and Barbara Woitas of the computing center of the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, were Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Gaul, southern Germany and Dalmatia.

According to Theodor Mommsen, cultural Romanization was more complete in those areas that developed a "neolatin language" (like Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian).