vulgaris

Vulgar comes from Latin vulgaris, an adjective meaning 'of or pertaining to the common people (vulgus), common, ordinary, everyday, widespread.' The vulgus in Roman society named the mass of ordinary people — neither the senatorial class nor the slaves, but the broad middle population of citizens, freedmen, and residents who made up the daily life of Rome's streets, markets, and taverns. Vulgaris described anything associated with this common population: vulgar Latin was the Latin spoken in the streets, as opposed to the formal Latin of courts and literature; vulgar opinion was the opinion of the crowd; a vulgar error was a mistake commonly made. The word was not initially insulting — it described the common, the widespread, the everyday — but the Roman aristocratic tendency to regard the opinions and tastes of the vulgus with contempt gradually lent the word a pejorative edge.

Vulgar Latin — Latina vulgaris — is one of the most consequential concepts in the history of language. The classical Latin of Cicero and Virgil was a formal, literary standard that differed significantly from the everyday speech of Roman soldiers, merchants, farmers, and urban residents. Spoken Latin was always more variable, more regional, more inventive with word order and vocabulary, less bound by the rules that classical authors codified. As the Roman Empire expanded and then fragmented, this spoken everyday Latin evolved differently in different regions, shaped by local languages, migration, conquest, and isolation. What emerged from this evolution, over several centuries, were the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, and their many relatives. Every one of these languages descended from vulgar Latin — the speech of ordinary people.

The pejorative shift of 'vulgar' in English tracks closely with class consciousness in post-Reformation English society. By the seventeenth century, vulgar had come to mean not merely 'of the common people' but 'coarse, unrefined, lacking in taste and decorum' — the assumption being that common people were by nature coarse and unrefined. This class-based slippage was characteristic of many words for the common: 'common' itself acquired the meaning 'lacking distinction'; 'ordinary' became a mild insult; 'plebeian' and 'boorish' (from boor, peasant) carried contempt. The English aristocratic tradition projected its own social anxieties onto the language, and the vocabulary of commonness became the vocabulary of inadequacy.

The richest irony of vulgar's history is that Vulgar Latin produced languages — French, Spanish, Italian — that English speakers have historically considered the most refined and culturally prestigious tongues available. French was the language of high culture in Europe from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries; a French education was the mark of cultivation; French cuisine, French fashion, and French philosophy set the standards of European sophistication. All of this descended directly from the vulgaris Latin of Roman soldiers and market women. The most refined European languages are, etymologically, the most vulgar — the children of common speech, the heirs of the streets.