I. The changes that occurred in spoken Latin during that time are unknown. Literary Latin, however, was maintained at a high standard, as seen in the Latin poetry of the African writer Corippus. The area around Carthage remained fully Latin-speaking until the arrival of the Arabs. Origins and development Like all Romance languages, African Romance descended from Vulgar Latin, the non-standard (in contrast to Classical Latin) form of the Latin language, which was spoken by soldiers and merchants throughout the Roman Empire. With the expansion of the empire, Vulgar Latin came to be spoken by inhabitants of the various Roman-controlled territories in North Africa. Latin and its descendants were spoken in the Province of Africa following the Punic Wars, when the Romans conquered the territory. Spoken Latin, and Latin inscriptions developed while Punic was still being used. Bilingual inscriptions were engraved, some of which reflect the introduction of Roman institutions into Africa, using new Punic expressions. Latin, and then some Romance variant of it, was spoken by generations of speakers, for about fifteen centuries. This was demonstrated by African-born speakers of African Romance who continued to create Latin inscriptions until the first half of the 11th century. Evidence for a spoken Romance variety which developed locally out of Latin persisted in rural areas of Tunisia – possibly as late as the last two decades of the 15th century in some sources. By the late 19th century and early 20th century, the possible existence of African Latin was controversial, with debates on the existence of Africitas as a putative African dialect of Latin. In 1882, the German scholar used unconvincing material to adduce features particular to Latin in Africa. This unconvincing evidence was attacked by Wilhelm Kroll in 1897, and again by Madeline D. Brock in 1911. Brock went so far as to assert that "African Latin was free from provincialism", and that African Latin was "the Latin of an epoch rather than that of a country". This view shifted in recent decades, with modern philologists going so far as to say that African Latin "was not free from provincialism" and that, given the remoteness of parts of Africa, there were "probably a plurality of varieties of Latin, rather than a single African Latin". Other researchers believe that features peculiar to African Latin existed, but are "not to be found where Sittl looked for it". While as a language African Romance