Vulgar Latin

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. Vulgar Latin as a term is both controversial and imprecise. Spoken Latin existed for a long time and in many places. Scholars have differed in opinion as to the extent of the differences and whether Vulgar Latin was in some sense a different language from Classical Latin. This was developed as a theory in the early 19th century by the French linguist François-Just-Marie Raynouard. At its extreme, the theory suggested that the written register formed an elite language distinct from common speech, but this is now rejected.

The current scholarly consensus is that the written and spoken languages formed a continuity much as they do in modern languages, with speech tending to evolve faster than the written language, and the written, formalised language exerting 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.