Why “Vulgar Latin” isn’t used by linguists anymore

The term "Vulgar Latin" has been so misused over the centuries that it has lost all meaning. Where did this term come from? What should we say instead?

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#latin #vulgarlatin #rant

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Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart

00:00 Intro
02:58 diglossia?
04:50 Textbook vs Real Latin
05:32 Sources of Latin today
07:30 Vulgar Latin may mean Informal Latin
09:30 JN Adams

[polyMATHY_Luke]

🤠 Take my course LATIN UNCOVERED on StoryLearning, including my original Latin adventure novella "Vir Petasātus"

🦂 Sign up for my Latin Pronunciation & Conversation series on Patreon:

🦂 Support my work on Patreon:

📚 Luke Ranieri Audiobooks:

Sources:
J.N Adams books


☕ Support my work with PayPal:

And if you like, do consider joining this channel:



🏛 Ancient Greek in Action · Free Greek Lessons:

👨‍🏫 My Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata playlist · Free Latin Lessons:

🦂 ScorpioMartianus (my channel *entirely* in Latin & Ancient Greek)

🎙 Hundreds of hours of Latin & Greek audio:

🌅 polýMATHY on Instagram:

🦁 Legio XIII Latin Language Podcast:

👕 Merch:



📖 My book Ranieri Reverse Recall on Amazon:

Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart

[SonofSethoitae]

I had no idea people thought Vulgar Latin was a totally different language. I've always understood it to mean "colloquial Latin"

[yvonnekurtz]

When I was an undergrad, I was taking second year Italian, second year French, second year Latin, and Latin composition all at the same time. (Tip: don’t do this.). One time I accidentally substituted an Italian word for a Latin word in a composition. My classmates were puzzled, however the professor said, “Oh, she’s just being vulgar!”

[SiddharthS]

This is so true! Just like we're all actually speaking "Vulgar English", and every English speaker has spoken only this variety for all these centuries

[vanhaven]

People talk about "vulgar latin" as something that was a solid block even in the supposed era it existed, like someone in Gaul speaking the so-called vulgar latin would be the same as someone in Hispania, because hey, everyone spoke "vulgar latin", right? It's frustrating when people fail to grasp a concept like "the latin spoken in Gaul evolved differently from the latin spoken in Hispania", thanks to distance, different influences, features that stuck in some regions and disappeared in others, etc.

[unochepassava]

It's pretty much the same situation with Sanskrit and Prakrit: you can hear many people asserting that "modern Indian languages come from Prakrit, not Sanskrit", even though the term Prakrit just means 'common tongue' and it's used as a catch-all name for all the idioms and dialects spoken along Sanskrit, which was just the standardised version of the language used for sacred texts and official writings.

[joshuasims]

This seems to be a common issue with studying historical languages. If you’re trying to learn Greek, there’s biblical Koine, Attic, Homeric, just to name a few. Modern Tibetan is already pluricentric, and it was used classically over such a huge stretch of time that the language of any given period will need to be studied separately. I believe Hebrew has a similar situation. It can be hard to grasp just how long these languages were in use and how much they changed over those periods.

[daciaromana]

I think the difference between classical Latin and "vulgar Latin", is the same as the difference between standard English and street English. Every English dialect has its own quirks, expressions, slang words and regionalisms depending on geography. So if we were to lazily apply the term "Vulgar English" to all these numerous and vastly different dialects, of course it's going to be a meaningless umbrella term. The truth is we have to determine which type of "vulgar Latin" we are talking about in order to have a meaningful conversation about vulgar Latin.

[Nikelaos_Khristianos]

Folks tend to have a pretty hard time appreciating just how much a language changes over time, it's not something that's easy to illustrate without specialised knowledge. Hence why I really appreciate the fact that you emphasise how Classical pronunciation was founded in literary tradition and does not necessarily insinuate that the spoken language was completely static for a period of 300 years or so. To suggest that of any language is kind of crazy to me.

[jstantongood]

Luke gets as frustrated when speaking about Latin as I do when I hear people speak about history. Certain things have been so obvious for so long to the specialist esp. if he loves his work, that reappearing misconceptions and misleading notions drive us crazy. Luke is a legend.

[yungmalaria]

I always thought “vulgar latin” was just a catch-all term for Latin post-roman empire that was mixed with whatever local cultures tongue.

[venustior]

"There is a public misconception about the nature of so-called Vulgar Latin" and "Vulgar Latin is not a thing" can and ought to be different statements

[LetThemTalkTV]

This is so damned interesting. I didn't know any of it.

[AleksandrPodyachev]

So it is like the difference in the English that you speak with your friends and family and the English that you write your high school English essay in?

[pkREX]

I'm gonna be honest I've never actually heard it used in this context. I've only ever heard it used as a way to describe the early stages of the local varieties that would later become the romance languages we know today. But I'm willing to bet you speak to more academics than me.

[feleslucis-emanueldearaujo]

Good thing you talked about this. Recently, I bought a Brazilian book teaching about Romance Linguistics and it made me quite confused because we still use this useless terminology. I agree with you, it's better to follow what you said here, since it makes the language feel more real since any language has informal and formal versions of it for various different contexts and avoids many misconceptions, such as the one you cited about a diglossia being what happened in the classical period, one misconception I had even quite recently.

[c-bass]

Next video should be “can Italians understand spoken Italian”

[odinseinherji]

When I first saw the title, my brain just automatically thought “The Romans didn’t have swear words??”😂

[pier.gio_o]

Thank you so much, Luke.
Your contents are flawless and useful.
Few people study, know, speak and love Latin as you do; among several people there is a general ignorance on such matters which manifests itself in unpleasant comments that make these videos necessary

[zackroot]

Really cool video overall! I still don't think that "vulgar latin" is a completely useless term, however. I think you're completely right that that people overuse it to describe a bunch of different things, but there is still use for "vulgar latin" as an evolutionary idea. The fact that aspects of Latin evolved in certain ways from Portugal to Romania is too much to be coincidence or independent changes. There's still a lot to learn about this process, but I think it's still important to know how certain registers of Latin experienced different amounts of change over time. I don't think you can get the answer from looking at a single text like the Satyricon, later texts like the Peregrinatio Egeriae, or even mishmashes of Classic / Medieval Latin and Old French like the Strasbourg Address, but it's really interesting to look at each individual piece to see what sort of larger phonological / grammatical trends were happening.

So yeah, it's not a useless term, just way overused :/