Popular Latin

E13983

Popular Latin is the non-standard, everyday form of Latin spoken by the common people of the Roman Empire, from which the Romance languages later developed.

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Statements (56)

Predicate Object
instanceOf historical language stage
variety of Latin
vernacular language
alsoKnownAs Vulgar Latin
sermo cotidianus
sermo plebeius
sermo vulgaris
ancestorOf Catalan
French
Galician
Italian
Occitan
Portuguese
Romanian
Romansh
Sardinian language
Spanish
contrastedWith Latin
surface form: Classical Latin

Medieval Latin
surface form: Literary Latin
developedInto Old French
Old Italian
Old Portuguese
Romanian language
surface form: Old Romanian

Old Spanish
Romance languages
Romansch
Sardinians
surface form: Sardinian
distinctFrom Ecclesiastical Latin
Medieval Latin
feature development of definite and indefinite articles in daughter languages
greater use of analytic verb forms
increased use of prepositions
lexical borrowing from substrate languages
loss of neuter gender in many areas
phonological simplification compared to Classical Latin
reduction of case system
regional dialectal variation
languageFamily Indo-European language family
surface form: Indo-European languages

Italic languages
notableScholar Friedrich Diez
Jules Gilliéron
Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke
partOf Italo-Western branch of Romance
reconstructedFrom early Romance texts
grammarians’ comments on incorrect Latin usage
inscriptions
non-literary documents
timePeriod Late Antiquity
Roman Empire
Late Roman Republic
surface form: late Roman Republic
usedBy common people of the Roman Empire
merchants in the Roman Empire
rural population of the Roman Empire
soldiers of the Roman army
usedIn Roman Empire
writingSystem Latin alphabet

Referenced by (1)

Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.

Vulgar Latin alternativeName Popular Latin