Vulgar Latin, also known as Colloquial, Popular, Spoken or Vernacular Latin, is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Latin was in conversational use across many centuries, in many locations, and in various contexts. Thus, Vulgar Latin as a term is both controversial and imprecise, with scholars differing in opinion as to the extent of the differences from Classical Latin and whether this broad umbrella was in some sense a distinct language or speech variety. At its extreme, the theory of a separate Vulgar Latin, first developed in the early 19th century by the French linguist François-Just-Marie Raynouard, suggested that the common speech differed from the written register that formed an elite language of its own, but this is now rejected. "Comparative scholars, especially in the nineteenth century ... tended to see Vulgar Latin and literary Latin as two very different kinds of language, or even two different languages altogether ... but [this] is now out of date"
The current scholarly consensus is that the written and spoken languages formed a continuum, much as they do in any language, with speech tending to evolve faster than the written language, and the written, formalised language exerting conservative pressure back on speech. The term Vulgar Latin is used in different ways by different scholars, applied to indicate spoken Latin of differing types, or from different social classes and time periods. Nevertheless, the shifts in the spoken forms remain very important to understanding the transition from Latin or Late Latin through to Proto-Romance and Romance languages. To make matters more complicated, evidence for spoken forms can be found only through examination of written Classical Latin, Late Latin, or early Romance, depending on the time period.
History of controversy During the Classical period, Roman authors referred to the informal, everyday variety of their own language as sermo plebeius or sermo vulgaris, meaning "common speech". This could simply refer to unadorned speech without the use of rhetoric, or even plain speech. The modern usage of the term "Vulgar Latin" dates to the Renaissance, when Italian humanists and Renaissance scholars began to theorize that their own language originated in a sort of "corrupted" Latin that they assumed formed an entity distinct from the literary Classical variety, though opinions differed greatly on the nature of this "vulgar" dialect., §6
The early 19th-century French linguist François-Just-Marie Raynouard is often regarded as the father of modern Romance philology. Observing that the Romance languages have many features in common that are not found in Latin, at least not in "proper" or Classical Latin, he concluded that the former must have all had some common ancestor (which he believed most closely resembled Old Occitan) that replaced Latin some time before the year 1000. This he dubbed la langue romane or "the Romance language".
The first truly modern treatise on Romance linguistics and the first to apply the comparative method was Friedrich Christian Diez's seminal Grammar of the Romance Languages. Researchers such as Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke characterised Vulgar Latin as, to a great extent, a separate language that was more or less distinct from the written form. To Meyer-Lübke, the spoken Vulgar form was the genuine and continuous form, while Classical Latin was a kind of artificial idealised language imposed upon it; thus Romance languages were derived from the "real" Vulgar form, which had to be reconstructed from remaining evidence. Others that followed this approach divided Vulgar from Classical Latin by education or class. Other views of "Vulgar Latin" include defining it as uneducated speech, slang, or in effect, Proto-Romance.
The result is that the term "Vulgar Latin" is regarded by some modern philologists as essentially meaningless, but unfortunately very persistent:
the continued use of "Vulgar Latin" is not only no aid to thought, but is, on the contrary, a positive barrier to a clear understanding of Latin and Romance....I wish it were possible to hope the term might fall out of use. Many scholars have stated that "Vulgar Latin" is a useless and dangerously misleading term ... To abandon it once and for all can only benefit scholarship.
Lloyd called to replace the use of "Vulgar Latin" with a series of more precise definitions, such as the spoken Latin of a particular time and place.
Research in the 20th century has in any case shifted the view to consider the differences between written and spoken Latin in more moderate terms. Just as in modern languages, speech patterns are different from written forms, and vary with education, the same can be said of Latin. For instance, philologist József Herman agrees that the term is problematic, and therefore limits it in his work to mean the innovations and changes that turn up in spoken or written Latin that were relatively uninfluenced by educated forms of Latin. Herman states: it is completely clear from the texts during the time that Latin was a living language, there was never an unbridgeable gap between the written and spoken, nor between the language of the social elites and that of the middle, lower, or disadvantaged groups of the same society. Herman also makes it clear that Vulgar Latin, in this view, is a varied and unstable phenomenon, crossing many centuries of usage where any generalisations are bound to cover up variations and differences.
Sources Evidence for the features of non-literary Latin comes from the following sources: Explicit mention of certain constructions or pronunciation habits by Roman grammarians. Recurrent grammatical, syntactic, or orthographic mistakes in Latin epigraphy. Curse tablets, as a special kind of inscription. The insertion, whether intentional or not, of colloquial terms or constructions into contemporary texts. Special interest is given to: Private letters and documents from an ordinary context such as business records, lists and school exercises; these are rare but papyri from Egypt and tablets from Hadrian's Wall have been found. Technical works on medicine, agriculture, and similar disciplines, where the demand for grammatical accuracy was lower, such as the Mulomedicina Chironis, a veterinary treatise. Christian texts, as many originated from marginalised communities; including early Bible translations and funeral inscriptions. Late Latin texts from the sixth century onwards, which show changes, or the absence thereof, in local Latin under the influence of new educational practices and social structures. The pronunciation of Roman-era lexical borrowings into neighboring languages such as Basque, Albanian, or Welsh. Modern Romance languages, the comparative analysis of which can be used to validate or disprove hypotheses about earlier changes in spoken Latin.
Fragmentation An oft-posed question is why (or when, or how) Latin "fragmented" into several different languages. As literary evidence suggests, the spread of spoken or "Vulgar Latin" became more and more intensive over time in major provinces of the Roman Empire (such as Britannia, Dalmatia, Gallia Narbonensis, Lusitania, Moesia, Pannonia, and Venetia et Histria), although to a varying degree in each one of them. Current hypotheses contrast the centralizing and homogenizing socio-economic, cultural, and political forces that characterized the Roman Empire with the centrifugal forces that prevailed afterwards.
By the end of the 1st century CE, the Romans had seized the entire Mediterranean Basin and established hundreds of colonies in the conquered provinces. Over time this—along with other factors that encouraged linguistic and cultural assimilation, such as political unity, frequent travel and commerce, military service, etc.—led to Latin becoming the predominant language throughout the western Mediterranean.Grandgent 1907: 2–3 Latin itself was subject to the same assimilatory tendencies, such that its varieties had probably become more uniform by the time the Empire fell than they had been before it. That is not to say that the language had been static for all those years, but rather that ongoing changes tended to spread to all regions.Wright 2002: 27–28; Pei 1941: 16, 23
The rise of the first Arab caliphate in the 7th century marked the definitive end of Roman dominance over the Mediterranean.Treadgold 1997: 371–372 It is from approximately that century onward that regional differences proliferate in Latin documents, revealing the fragmentation of Latin into the incipient Romance languages.Carlton 1973: 237. According to Pei & Gaeng (1976: 76–81), the decisive moment came with the Islamic conquest of North Africa and Iberia, which was followed by numerous raids on land and by sea. All this had the effect of disrupting connections between the western Romance-speaking regions. Until then Latin appears to have been remarkably homogeneous, as far as can be judged from its written records, although careful statistical analysis reveals regional differences in the treatment of the vowel /ĭ/, and in the frequency of the merger of (original) intervocalic /b/ and /w/, by about the fifth century CE.
Phonological development
Consonantism
Loss of nasals Word-final /m/ was lost in polysyllabic words.Pope 1934: §156.2 In monosyllables it tended to survive as /n/.Hall 1976: 180 /n/ was usually lost before fricatives, resulting in compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel (e.g. sponsa 'fiancée' > spōsa).Allen 1965: 27–29
Palatalization Front vowels in hiatus (after a consonant and before another vowel) became [j], which palatalized preceding consonants.Gouvert 2015: 83
Fricativization /w/ (except after /k/) and intervocalic /b/ merge as the bilabial fricative /β/.Pope 1934: §155; Gouvert 2016: 48
Simplification of consonant clusters The cluster /nkt/ reduced to [ŋt].Grandgent 1907: §267; Pope 1934: §156.3 /kw/ delabialized to /k/ before back vowels.Grandgent 1907: §226; Pope 1934: §187.b /ks/ before or after a consonant, or at the end of a word, reduced to /s/.Grandgent 1907: §255
Vocalism
Monophthongization /ae̯/ and /oe̯/ monophthongized to [ɛː] and [eː] respectively by around the second century AD.Palmer 1988: 157
Loss of vowel quantity The system of phonemic vowel length collapsed by the 5th century CE (see also ), leaving quality differences as the distinguishing factor between vowels; the paradigm thus changed from /ī ĭ ē ĕ ā ă ŏ ō ŭ ū/ to /i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/ with no distinction between original /a/ and /aː/. Concurrently, stressed vowels in open syllables lengthened.Leppänen & Alho 2018: 21–22
Loss of near-close front vowel Towards the end of the Roman Empire /ɪ/ merged with /e/ in most regions,Adams 2013: 60–1, 67 although not in Africa or a few peripheral areas in Italy.Adams 2007: 626–9
Grammar
Romance articles It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article, absent in Latin but present in all Romance languages, arose, largely because the highly colloquial speech in which it arose was seldom written down until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show the articles fully developed.