L • ▶ language introduction Two factors account for the changes in world languages during the Middle Ages: migration and conquest and isolation Arabic, along with Bantu and Turkish languages, were spread across continents as their native speakers left their homelands Other languages, most notably the Romance languages descended from Latin, developed because populations found themselves cut off from contact with the larger world The Middle Ages saw three great migrations One was of the Bantu-speaking peoples from the region of the upper Congo They swept across southern Africa, bringing a new culture marked by agriculture and ironworking technology as well as the proto-Bantu language, and they supplanted or absorbed local cultures, many of whom were hunter-gatherers After this expansion, the forces of isolation differentiated proto-Bantu into many of the modern languages of central and southern Africa In another wave of conquest Arab groups occupied the Near East and the Mediterranean coast of Africa, replacing many local languages with Arabic Speakers of Altaic languages (Turkish and Mongolian) poured out of inner Asia at the beginning of the Middle Ages in raids and conquests fueled by the invention of the stirrup and the military supremacy this brought to their cavalry Turks dislodged Hunnic peoples to the west, who in turn brought pressure to bear on the Germanic tribes that as a result broke into and destroyed the Western Roman Empire Mongols conquered China and India as part of the same outward migration While these migrants absorbed the languages of their subject peoples, a later wave of Turkish tribesmen conquered much of the Islamic world and established the Ottoman Empire, bringing Turkish as the new dominant language of Asia Minor (Turkey) The most profound linguistic effects were felt in the West The political cohesion of the Western Roman Empire was destroyed, and regional dialects were allowed to develop in isolation, becoming within a few hundred years early versions of the modern Romance languages: Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Provenỗal, French, Italian, Romanian, and others The Germanic languages of the conquerors were also quickly lost (except in Britain) Even these languages existed as smaller groups of dialects Only with the invention of printing at the end of the Middle Ages did the modern national languages emerge in western Europe Isolation was also the main factor in the development of language in the Americas Whether or not the initial Asian immigrants who populated America across the Bering Strait all spoke languages of the same family, by the Middle Ages the isolation of small populations and the restless movement of tribal groups had given birth to an amazing diversity of languages with nearly 150 distinct language families (each equivalent to Indo-European or Semitic), not individual languages, in South America alone and nearly 100 more in North America 587