Speakers of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and various other lesser-known languages and dialects.
All of these are directly descended from Latin in exactly the same way that today's English is descended from 1900s English, just over a longer period.
Is 1900-AD English "a dead language" because nobody who spoke it natively is still alive? What about 1800, 1700, or 1000? What year did English die and if it did indeed die, what are we speaking now?
The reasons for considering English circa 1000 and English circa 2020 to be "different stages of the same language" but Latin and French to be "different languages" are an arbitrary cultural distinction not rooted in science. The English of Beowulf is just as different from the modern variety as French is from Latin. And at every point from the introduction of Latin into France thousands of years ago until the present day, everybody could communicate perfectly easily with their own grandparents, and thought they were speaking the same language.
The natural conclusion to this argument is that everyone on earth is speaking the same language, because they all descended from the Mitochondrial Eve’s utterances 150000 years ago.
No, the natural conclusion is that whether two varieties are "the same language" or "different forms of the same language" is a cultural question, not a scientific one that can be answered objectively.
(Tangent -- certainly not all languages are descended from a hypothetical Proto-World, since we have examples of brand new languages forming: any creole languages, or Nicaraguan Sign Language. Whether most of the major language families are descended from a Proto-World is very much an open question, and probably one that will never be answered, since even if say, English and Navajo are genetically related, they diverged so long before we had written records that no trace remains.)
In any case, there's a meaningful difference between a language gradually changing over hundreds of years such that the newer varieties are quite different from the old ones, and a language truly dying, because it has exactly one remaining native speaker, and that person dies.
> No, the natural conclusion is that whether two varieties are "the same language" or "different forms of the same language" is a cultural question, not a scientific one that can be answered objectively.
It's a question that linguists (who are scientists) strive to answer in ways that are useful to studying, reasoning about, and explaining language. It's not much different than the species problem in biology. Everyone knows that speciation happens gradually, but scientists still propose ways of defining and explaining speciation to aid in scientific inquiry. The labels and dividing lines themselves are not empirically observed, of course, but that doesn't mean they're unscientific or outside the purview of scientific inquiry.
As far as I know, there generally aren’t papers that contain debates between multiple linguists. Scientific papers usually aren’t written as debate transcripts. But there are certainly many papers about dead languages, and about the lines between languages. You can look at pretty much any of the citations on Wikipedia articles about dead languages like a Middle English, or creole languages.
> Scientific papers usually aren’t written as debate transcripts.
Sure they are, although a debate wouldn't be contained in one paper written collaboratively by debating authors, as you seem to imagine -- it would play out over a series of papers, each of which cites previous papers and claims they're wrong.
For example, Timm 1989[1] argues that modern Breton is a VSO language, disputing the claims of Varin 1979[2], who claims it is SVO, which in turn disputes the traditional understanding that it is indeed VSO.
Or the famous paper of Haspelmath 2011[3] citing many other authors' proposed approaches to word segmentation and arguing that they're all wrong (i.e., that "word" is not a meaningfully defined concept in linguistics).
Where are the papers that you claim exist about the lines between languages? If this is really something mainstream linguists care about, you should be able to give examples in non-fringe journals.
I just checked the citations on the Wikipedia article for Middle English like you suggested, and found zero papers about whether Middle English should be considered "the same language" as modern English. Can you tell me which ones specifically you mean?
[1]: Timm, L. (1989). "Word Order in 20th Century Breton". Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Vol. 7, No. 3, Special Celtic Issue, pp. 361-378 (https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/4047723)
[2]: Varin, A. (1979). "VSO and SVO Order in Breton". Archivum Linguisticum 10, pp. 83-101
It's very much used in science for naming things, for studying old literature and also in the Catholic Church. We also had Latin courses in highschool. Also many words in many European languages, including Englush, have Latin or Greek roots.
I studied (classical, not ecclesiastical) Latin for about 8 years, and I don't think it's accurate to claim that the Romance languages are in any meaningful sense "Latin".
The weaker (and more reasonable) claim is that learning Latin improves your ability to recognize words and (very basic) structures in its descendants.
Roman graffiti from Herculaneum and Pompeii in particular shed some light on early vulgar Latin, suggesting that already that the regional homogeneity of the vulgar register was already breaking down by the time of the Plinian eruption. Given the large volume of uncovered graffiti, it is fairly easy to discern several trends, notably the loss of written dipthongs (æ->e, oe->e; comparably au->o), losses of final unaccented consonants and medial vowels.
http://ancientgraffiti.org/about/ is an excellent resource specifically for Herculaneum and Pompeii, but it also links to broader collections to which the project has contributed.
There are interesting aspects of graffiti throughout the Roman Empire. Children (or exceptionally short adults) practised writing on walls; some taller people's graffiti showed not just literacy but familiarity with Virgil and even decent command of Greek and other second languages. Conversely, numerous graffiti are supporting evidence for partial Latin literacy among speakers of other languages, even among celtic-language informal epigraphers in the west and northwest in the first decades CE. It seems likely that these influences "accented" day-to-day Latin, perhaps comparably to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish .
Latin and the Romance languages are indeed very different, but their similarities are much stronger than just vocabulary. The Romance languages have lost noun cases and gained prepositions, fixed word order, and definite articles, but they retain noun genders (though without neuter), remnants of the case system in pronouns ("je", "me", "moi"), many of the same verb tenses, and the subjunctive/indicative moods, to give a few examples.
Anyway, my point is that it's an error to say that Latin "stopped changing". Other languages have changed similar amounts: modern Americans can't understand Beowulf, modern Greeks can't understand Homer, and modern Chinese people can't understand Confucious, but nobody would claim that English or Greek or Chinese died and stopped changing. The fact that people call Latin, but not English, a "dead language" is purely due to the fact that the different stages of English all happen to be called "English".
In an alternate world where Latin was exactly the same as it was in the past, and Italian is exactly the same as it is now, but Latin had never spread outside of Italy, I suspect that we would today call Latin "Old Italian" (or perhaps we would call Italian "Modern Latin"), and nobody would be having this discussion, despite the scientific/linguistic facts being identical to what they are in our reality.
> The fact that people call Latin, but not English, a "dead language" is purely due to the fact that the different stages of English all happen to be called "English".
I don't think this is the case: the language that Beowulf is written in is normally referred to as Old English. Chaucer is Middle English. Shakespeare is Early Modern English. William Makepeace Thackeray is Victorian English.
IMO, it's reasonable to assert that each of these are "dead" in some meaningful way: even Early Modern and Victorian English, despite their intelligibility, are simply not spoken by any group of current-day English speakers.
All of these are directly descended from Latin in exactly the same way that today's English is descended from 1900s English, just over a longer period.