Generations of historians have represented Augustine of Hippo as the single most important figure in Christianity’s transition from antiquity to the medieval world. He is usually seen as an intransigent defender of classical values against the inevitable erosion caused by the spread of Christianity to multiple locations and populations. Yet Augustine was not Roman, nor was Latin his native tongue. He was born and raised in North Africa; Punic was the language of his childhood. Catherine Conybeare presents Augustine as a passionate and complex man who, rather than suppressing his loyalty to either Latin- or Punic-speaking churches, remained loyal both to the Roman church that baptized and ordained him and to his African identity.It seems that there were still speakers of Punic (more precisely, Neo-Punic) in Augustine's time and that we know something about them. Some of them even constituted an "African church" with its own identity. That's the most interesting aspect of this book for me.[...]
For more on Conybeare, Augustine the African, see here and here.
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