Writing, colonisation and latinization in the Iberian Peninsula

The spread of writing and the Latin language in the Iberian peninsula is closely linked to the development of military control of this territory carried out under the Roman republic.. The Roman conquest resulted, on the one hand, in the progressive replacement of Palaeohispanic writing—or scripts, considering each independent variant, that is south-eastern or Meridional, North-eastern or Levantine, and Celtiberian—with the Latin alphabet and, on the other, in the disappearance of most indigenous languages. Only a few of them survived with uneven outcomes during the imperial period. This period of transformation lasted more than two centuries, during which different local developments occurred, resulting from the great linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of the indigenous populations.