Vulgar Latin

Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris, "folk speech") is a blanket term covering the popular dialects and sociolects of the Latin language which diverged from each other in the early Middle Ages, evolving into the Romance languages by the 6th century. Vulgar Latin can also refer to vernacular speech from other periods, including the Classical period, in which case it may also be called Popular Latin.

Spoken Latin differed from literary Latin in its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, though some of its features did not appear until the late Empire. Other features are likely to have been present much earlier in spoken Latin.

During the Middle Ages, Vulgar Latin coexisted with a more classically structured form of the language, Medieval Latin, which was used by scholars, scribes and the clergy in formal settings, but did not have any native speakers.

What was Vulgar Latin?

The Cantar de Mio Cid (Song of my Cid) is the earliest text of reasonable length that exists in Medieval Spanish, and marks the beginning of this language as distinct from Vulgar Latin

The name "vulgar" simply means "folk", derived from the Latin word vulgaris, meaning "of people". "Vulgar Latin" has a variety of meanings:

1. Variation within Latin (socially, geographically, and chronologically) that differs from the Classical literary standard in an age when most people were illiterate and the primary method of language transmission between people was oral. This typically excludes the language of the more educated upper classes, which, although it does include variation, comes closest to the literary standard.
2. The spoken Latin of the Roman Empire. Classical Latin represents the literary register of Latin, based on the model of ancient literary Greek. It represented a selection from a hypothetical variety of spoken forms. The Latin brought by Roman soldiers to Gaul, Iberia or Dacia was probably not identical to the Latin of Cicero, and differed from it in vocabulary, and later in syntax and grammar as well. By this definition, Vulgar Latin was a spoken language and Classical Latin was used for writing, with the later style of literary Latin being slightly different, showing greater influence from the hypothetical vulgar dialects, compared to the earlier "classical" standards.
3. The hypothetical ancestor of the Romance languages ("Proto-Romance"), which cannot be directly known, except from a few graffiti inscriptions. Proto-Romance is a hypothetical vernacular derived from Latin that had undergone important and varying sound shifts and other changes which can be reconstructed from the changes evident in its descendants.
4. "Vulgar Latin" is sometimes used to describe the grammatical changes found in some Late Latin texts, such as the 4th-century Itinerarium Egeriae, Egeria's account of her journey to Palestine and Mt. Sinai; or the works of St Gregory of Tours. Since written documentation of Vulgar Latin forms is scarce, these works are invaluable to philologists, mainly because of the occasional presence of variations or errors in spelling, providing some evidence of spoken usage during the period in which they were written.

Most definitions of "Vulgar Latin" define it as the spoken, rather than written, language. It is important to remember that "Vulgar Latin" is an abstract term, not the name of any particular dialect. The term itself predates the field of sociolinguistics, and research into the history of Vulgar Latin was in some ways a precursor to sociolinguistics. The latter studies language variation associated with social variables, and tends not to view variation as a strict standard–non-standard dichotomy (for example, Classical–Vulgar Latin) but as variations. In light of fields such as sociolinguistics, dialectology, and historical linguistics, Vulgar Latin is the sociological, geographical and historic variations in Latin that excludes the speech and the writings of the educated classes. It is because there are so many types of variation that definitions of Vulgar Latin differ so much.

History

Because the daily speech of Latin speakers was not transcribed, Vulgar Latin can only be studied indirectly. Knowledge of Vulgar Latin comes from three chief sources: First, the comparative method reconstructs the underlying forms from the attested Romance languages, and notes where they differ from Classical Latin; second, various prescriptive grammar texts from the Late Latin period condemn linguistic errors that Latin speakers were liable to commit, giving us an idea of how Latin was spoken; third, the solecisms and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in Late Latin texts also reveal, in part, the author's spoken language.

Some literary works written in a lower register of Latin also provide a glimpse into the world of early Vulgar Latin. The works of Plautus and Terence, being comedies with many characters who were slaves, preserve basilectal Latin features, as does the recorded speech of freedmen in the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius Arbiter.

For many centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, Vulgar Latin continued to coexist with a written form of Late Latin, Medieval Latin; for when speakers of Romance vernaculars set out to write with correct grammar and spelling, they attempted to emulate the norms of Classical Latin. This scholarly Latin, "frozen" by Justinian's codifications of Roman law on the one hand, and by the Catholic Church on the other, was eventually unified by the medieval copyists; it continued to exist as a Dachsprache in the Middle Ages, and a lingua franca well beyond them.

Vulgar Latin developed differently in the various provinces of the Roman Empire, gradually giving rise to such languages as French, Catalan, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and several dozen other languages. Although the official language in these areas was Latin, Vulgar Latin was popularly spoken until the new localized forms diverged sufficiently from Latin, thus emerging as separate languages. However, despite the widening gulf between the spoken and written Latin, throughout the imperial era and until the 8th century CE, it was not significant enough as to make them mutually unintelligible. József Herman states:

It seems certain that in the sixth century, and quite likely into the early parts of the seventh century, people in the main Romanized areas could still largely understand the biblical and liturgical texts and the commentaries (of greater or lesser simplicity) that formed part of the rites and of religious practice, and that even later, throughout the seventh century, saints' lives written in Latin could be read aloud to the congregations with an expectation that they would be understood. We can also deduce however, that in Gaul, from the central part of the eighth century onwards, many people, including several of the clerics, were not able to understand even the most straightforward religious texts.

Indeed, at the third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language — either in the rustica lingua romanica (Vulgar Latin), or in the Germanic vernaculars — since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin. Within a generation, the Oaths of Strasbourg (842), a treaty between Charlemagne's grandsons Charles the Bald and Louis the German, was proffered and recorded in a language that was already distinguished from Latin. Consider the excerpt below:

Extract of the Oaths

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in ajudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift, in o quid il me altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid numquam prindrai, qui, meon vol, cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

For the love of God and for Christendom and our common salvation, from this day onwards, as God will give me the wisdom and power, I shall protect this brother of mine Charles, with aid or anything else, as one ought to protect one's brother, so that he may do the same for me, and I shall never knowingly make any covenant with Lothair that would harm this brother of mine Charles.

From this point on, the Latin vernaculars began to be treated as separate languages in practice, developing local norms and orthographies of their own, and "Vulgar Latin" ceases to be a useful term.