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I have a feeling it is Isidore of Seville. Does anyone know if he specifically commented on the language spoken by the common people around him. I'm of course aware that there is no hard boundary between Latin and Spanish, between roughly the year 500 and 800, still an attempt can be made at determining the last writer of Latin who was a native speaker.

bobsmith76
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    The answer might depend on your definition of a native speaker. If someone grows up in a bilingual home and speaks two languages with similar fluency, would they be considered native speakers of both? You seem to hint at defining a native language as the everyday social language, but that may change throughout a person's life. If I were to fully immerse myself in a Latin speaking environment for the next decade, would I become a native speaker? (Perhaps it is best to leave this undefined and let the answerers make reasonable judgement calls.) – Joonas Ilmavirta Sep 28 '21 at 15:42
  • Yes, I think it is best to leave it undefined. It's not something that can easily be agreed on. Just provide your candidates and the reasons and let the readers decide who they think is the last native speaker/author – bobsmith76 Sep 28 '21 at 16:06
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    It's also difficult to define what counts as a native speaker of Latin in particular. The disconnect between Classical Latin and reconstructed Proto-Romance implies that from a relatively early date people weren't natively speaking like Cicero wrote. (And if you count Proto-Romance as Latin, which is a valid stance—then where's the cutoff point where Romance is no longer Latin?) – Draconis Sep 28 '21 at 17:20
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    Just do the best you can. Don't let the difficulty get in the way of making an attempt to offer a suggestion. – bobsmith76 Sep 28 '21 at 17:57
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    This is like asking what was the last ancestor of Homo sapiens that was a quadruped. Bipedality evolved gradually. There was no last quadruped or first biped. There were many generations of people who considered themselves to be speaking Latin, but who we might today describe as speaking early versions of Spanish, French, or Italian. A more meaningful historical question might be who was the first writer of Latin who, in writing, said, "I am writing in Latin, which is a different language from Spanish." –  Sep 28 '21 at 18:13

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