Ecclesiastical Latin
Sign in to saveAlso known as Church Latin, Liturgical Latin
variety of Latin that is used for liturgical purposes
Key facts
- Native to
- Never spoken as a native language; other uses vary widely by period and location
- Extinct
- Still used for many purposes, mostly as a liturgical language of the Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church , and (rarely) in Anglicanism and Lutheranism . Also used in the Western Rite of the Eastern Orthodox Church .
- Language family
- Indo-European Italic Latino-Faliscan Latin Ecclesiastical Latin
- Early form
- Old Latin
- Writing system
- Latin
- Iso 639 3
- –
- Glottolog
- None
- Ietf
- la-VA
via Wikipedia infobox
~17 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Usage of Ecclesiastical Latin in the Traditional Roman Missal
Ecclesiastical Latin, also called Church Latin or Liturgical Latin, is a form of Latin developed to discuss Christian thought in late antiquity and used in Christian liturgy, theology, and church administration to the present day, especially in the Catholic Church. It includes words from Vulgar Latin and Classical Latin (as well as Greek and Hebrew) re-purposed with Christian meaning. It is less stylized and more rigid in form than Classical Latin, sharing vocabulary, forms, and syntax, while at the same time incorporating informal elements which had always been with the language yet excluded by the literary authors of Classical Latin.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Ecclesiastical Latin” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.