Vulgar Latin

Vulgar Latin was never meant to exist. Roman grammarians did not name it, teach it, or even fully acknowledge it — they were too busy perfecting Classical Latin, the language of Cicero and Virgil. But out in the markets of Ostia, the legionary camps along the Rhine, the taverns of Carthage, ordinary Romans were doing something different with the language: stripping its complex case endings, flattening its long and short vowels into a single melodic register, importing words from every province they occupied. This was Sermo Vulgaris, the common speech, and it was alive in a way the literary language was not.

The word vulgar carries no shame in its origin. It descends from vulgus, the Latin for the common people, and simply meant the Latin spoken by everyone who was not a philosopher or a senator. For centuries it coexisted with Classical Latin the way a dialect coexists with a prestige standard: everyone understood both, but only certain contexts demanded the polished register. Soldiers, merchants, slaves, and craftsmen talked to each other in the vernacular, and that vernacular was never static. It borrowed aggressively from Oscan and Umbrian in Italy, from Gaulish in what is now France, from Punic in North Africa, from Greek in every port city along the Mediterranean.

When the western Roman Empire began fracturing in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, Vulgar Latin was already well on its way to becoming several different languages. Cut off from the centralizing authority of Rome, regional varieties evolved at different speeds along different phonological paths. In Iberia, intervocalic consonants softened and eventually disappeared. In Gaul, a Germanic superstrate pushed the vowel system toward nasal sounds and lengthened stressed syllables. In Dacia, isolated beyond the Danube, the local variety preserved archaic features that later relatives would lose. No council declared these changes official. They simply accumulated until, by the ninth century, people in Paris could no longer understand people in Toulouse without effort, and neither could read Cicero without years of study.

The first written document in a recognizable descendant of Vulgar Latin dates to 842 CE: the Strasbourg Oaths, a military alliance sworn by the grandsons of Charlemagne in their respective vernaculars, one of them unmistakably proto-French. But the living tradition runs further back, through every wax tablet scratched by a Roman soldier, every merchant ledger tallied in market Latin, every wall inscription at Pompeii that grammarians would have crossed out. Vulgar Latin was the language of people who had no time for declensions. In losing its complexity, it seeded the richness of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, and a dozen further tongues — each a fragment of the empire, speaking still.