 Ethelred the Pious |
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Romança (which we can call Romance) was the name of the language of the common people in the Western Roman Empire. Clearly descended from Latin, the language had some key features that it shared with languages in Neustria, Spain and the Balkans, such as the loss of most noun cases and the addition of articles.
By the start of this timeline in the late Ninth Century, there was a clear distinction between the Latin taught in schools and monasteries, and the Romance spoken by the common people. They were still close enough that a young Romance-speaking student might feel like he was learning a set of linguistic flourishes rather than an entire new language, but really the two were no longer mutually intelligible. Latin sermons went totally over the heads of uneducated listeners. At the same time, Romance was almost purely a non-literate language.
In the late Tenth and Eleventh Centuries, a tradition of Romance poetry began to grow, with its center in the kingdom of Provença in southern Gaul. Beginning as a rustic form of popular entertainment, the work of the region's traveling poets grew increasingly sophisticated and by the early 1000s was being performed in aristocratic courts.
The conquests of Godfrey of Burgundy in 1047 brought a new dynasty to the imperial throne. The center of the empire moved From Aquitania to Provença and northern Italy; the emperor's son Godfrey II confirmed this by making Masilia the imperial capital. Besides giving new prominence to the dialect - and literature - of Provença, this shift tied the culture of these two regions closely together. Romance literature flourished in the imperial lands of Italy during the late 1000s and early 1100s. By that time, people thought of Romança as one single vernacular language for the whole empire, perhaps divided into dialects, but clearly distinct from the foreign languages spoken outside the empire in Neustria or Spain. And while Latin reigned supreme as the language of education and government, Romança was gaining ever more prestige.
While the timeline is doesn't come close to reaching the present day, it's safe to assume that Romança remains the language of this region today, and that it combines features of the OTL Occitan language and the North-Italian dialects.