system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: why don't Italians speak latin?

What happened to latin? Surely if the centre of the Roman empire was in Italy they would still speak latin today!?
gpt
All languages evolve over time. The Latin language spread out and, as languages do, evolved in different ways in different areas to give us the modern Romance languages Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and so on.

Even when Latin was still being spoken as Latin, it changed from one generation to the next. The early Romans spoke Old Latin, which evolved into the Classical Latin which is what we usually think of as "Latin", and which went through many changes over its lifetime; changes continued throughout the Mediaeval period and the Renaissance.

Latin is still spoken in the Vatican, of course, which is in Rome, and has the world's only ATM that can display instructions in Latin. But it's not the same Latin the Romans spoke: it's a later version, Ecclesiatical Latin.

All these versions of Latin were those spoken by the educated people. Ordinary people spoke vulgar Latin ("vulgar" simply means "of the people" and doesn't mean "obscene"), which again varied from place to place and through the generations -- just as most of us today speak a version of English that you wouldn't expect to hear the US President use in his State of the Union address.

And there is one version of this vulgar Latin that has survived to this day. Well, in truth, many of them did and are now French, Italian, Spanish, etc., but this one is much, much more closely related to actual Latin than any of the others, including Italian. It's a language called Ladin, spoken in remote communities in the mountains of northern Italy. So if you want to know what happened to Latin, apart from the slightly artificial version used by the Church, it still exists and is spoken by about 30,000 people. Cicero, however, would not be able to understand a word.