Latin

===Vulgar Latin===
{{Main|Vulgar Latin}}

Philological analysis of Archaic Latin works, such as those of [[Plautus]], which contain fragments of everyday speech, gives evidence of an informal register of the language, Vulgar Latin (termed {{lang|la|sermo vulgi}}, "the speech of the masses", by [[Cicero]]). Some linguists, particularly in the nineteenth century, believed this to be a separate language, existing more or less in parallel with the literary or educated Latin, but this is now widely dismissed.<ref>{{harvnb|Herman|2000|p=5}} "Comparative scholars, especially in the nineteenth century … tended to see Vulgar Latin and literary Latin as two very different kinds of language, or even two different languages altogether … but [this] is now out of date"</ref>

The term 'Vulgar Latin' remains difficult to define, referring both to informal speech at any time within the history of Latin, and the kind of informal Latin that had begun to move away from the written language significantly in the post-Imperial period, that led ultimately to the [[Romance languages]].

During the Classical period, informal language was rarely written, so philologists have been left with only individual words and phrases cited by classical authors, inscriptions such as [[Curse tablets]] and those found as [[Roman graffiti|graffiti]]. In the [[Late Latin]] period, language changes reflecting spoken (non-classical) norms tend to be found in greater quantities in texts.<ref>{{harvnb|Herman|2000|pp=17–18}}</ref>
As it was free to develop on its own, there is no reason to suppose that the speech was uniform either diachronically or geographically. On the contrary, Romanised European populations developed their own dialects of the language, which eventually led to the differentiation of [[Romance languages]].<ref>{{harvnb|Herman|2000|p=8}}</ref>