Concept
Vulgar Latin
Overview
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.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest integration. How small is the degree of this integration, however, when compared with that reached in well-developed languages is shown both by the great length of the compound words used for things and acts of constant…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Vulgar Latin is.
First of all, languages are by this simplification rendered more prolix, several words having become necessary to express what could have been expressed by a single word before. Thus the words, _Dei_ and _Deo_, in the Latin, sufficiently show, without any addition, what relation the object signified is understood to stand in to the objects expressed by the other words in the sentence. But to express the same…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
States what Vulgar Latin is.
It is not difficult, therefore, to distinguish between this kind of speaking and the eloquence which we are now treating of. For the address of philosophers is gentle, and fond of retirement, and not furnished with popular ideas or popular expressions, not fettered by any particular rhythm, but allowed a good deal of liberty.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4
States what Vulgar Latin is.
Philosophers who discussed Vulgar Latin
Related ideas
- Manchester University Press
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- Ancient Greek
- Jerome
- Latin
- University of Chicago Press
- Pompeii
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- Renaissance
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Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Fascism.