It was not until the Moorish conquest of Spain in 711, cutting off communications between the major Romance regions, that the languages began to diverge seriously. Despite dialectal variation, which is found in any widespread language, the languages of Spain, France, Portugal, and Italy have retained a remarkable unity in phonological forms and developments, bolstered by the stabilising influence of their common Christian (Roman Catholic) culture. Ĭurrently, the five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian. It was more in line with everyday speech, not only because of a decline in education but also because of a desire to spread the word to the masses. The decline of the Roman Empire meant a deterioration in educational standards that brought about Late Latin, a postclassical stage of the language seen in Christian writings of the time. These dialects were distinct from the classical form of the language spoken by the Roman upper classes, the form in which Romans generally wrote. The Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin and were originally the popular and informal dialects spoken by various layers of the Latin-speaking population. On the contrary, romanised European populations developed their own dialects of the language, which eventually led to the differentiation of Romance languages. Īs it was free to develop on its own, there is no reason to suppose that the speech was uniform either diachronically or geographically. The informal language was rarely written, so philologists have been left with only individual words and phrases cited by classical authors and those found as graffiti. Philological analysis of Archaic Latin works, such as those of Plautus, which contain fragments of everyday speech, indicates that a spoken language, Vulgar Latin (termed sermo vulgi, "the speech of the masses", by Cicero), existed concurrently with literate Classical Latin. Main articles: Vulgar Latin, Late Latin, and Romance languages
In particular, Latin (and Ancient Greek) roots are still used in English descriptions of theology, science disciplines (especially anatomy and taxonomy), medicine, and law. Latin has also greatly influenced the English language and historically contributed many words to the English lexicon after the Christianization of Anglo-Saxons and the Norman conquest. Later, New Latin evolved during the early modern era to eventually become various forms of rarely spoken Contemporary Latin, one of which, Ecclesiastical Latin, remains the official language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church at Vatican City. Medieval Latin was used during the Middle Ages as a literary language from the 9th century to the Renaissance, which then used Renaissance Latin. Late Latin is the written language from the 3rd century its various Vulgar Latin dialects developed in the 6th to 9th centuries into the modern Romance languages. Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken at that time among lower-class commoners and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence and author Petronius. The Latin alphabet is directly derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets.īy the late Roman Republic (75 BC), Old Latin had been standardised into Classical Latin used by educated elites. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders, six or seven noun cases, five declensions, four verb conjugations, six tenses, three persons, three moods, two voices, two or three aspects, and two numbers. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Latin ( lingua Latīna, or Latīnum, ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Recording of two fluent modern-day classical Latin speakers talking about the Ninfa Gardens, with English and Latin subtitles
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