Vulgar Latin

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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. 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...

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