Vulgar Latin - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vulgar Latin
Proto-Romance
sermō vulgāris
Native to	Roman Republic, Roman Empire
Era	Antiquity; developed into Romance languages 6th to 9th centuries
Language family	Indo-European Italic Latino-Faliscan Latin Vulgar Latin
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Linguist List	lat-vul
Glottolog	None
The Roman Empire in 117 AD
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Vulgar Latin, or Common Latin, is one of the two types of Latin, an old language that was spoken by the Romans. Vulgar Latin is not spoken anymore, but its many dialects eventually became what are now Romance languages (such as Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian). Vulgar Latin was spoken by the regular people (vulgus in Latin means "common"): farmers, workers and others without a great deal of education.

Classical Latin is the type of Latin that was first spoken by the Romans. As time went by, fewer and fewer people spoke Classical Latin, and in the end, the language changed to become Vulgar Latin. After a while, only scholars spoke Classical Latin, but books were still written in it.

Latin is no longer spoken as a native language, but many educational institutions teach it as a second language, and many Roman Catholic Church officials are fluent in it.

Vulgar Latin is similar to Classical Latin but has some differences in pronunciation and vocabulary. Latin has five basic cases for nouns,

• Grandgent, Charles Hall, An introduction to vulgar Latin (1907) (.pdf, .djvu) on www.archive.org