Latin

Latin, also called *lingua Latina* or *Latinum*, is a classical language from the Italic branch of Indo-European. It was first spoken by the Latins in Latium—modern-day Lazio—around the lower Tiber area near Rome, Italy. As the Roman Republic expanded, Latin became the main language of the Italian Peninsula and later the entire Roman Empire. Its influence on many languages is substantial; English, for instance, gained a large number of words from Latin, especially after the Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman Conquest. Latin roots are especially common in the technical terms of theology, science, medicine, and law.

By the late Roman Republic, Old Latin had developed into a standardised form called Classical Latin. In contrast, Vulgar Latin refers to the less formal, everyday speech found in inscriptions and some literary works, like the comedies of Plautus and Terence or the writings of Petronius. Although Latin is often called a "dead language," it did not truly die out. Between the 6th and 9th centuries, natural changes in spoken Latin across different regions evolved into the distinct Romance languages. After the Western Roman Empire fell, Latin remained the common language for international communication, science, scholarship, and academia in Europe until the early 19th century, when modern languages gradually replaced it in academic and political use.

Late Latin is the literary form used from the 3rd century AD onward. No longer a native spoken language, Medieval Latin served as a working and literary language across Western and Catholic Europe from the 9th century through the Middle Ages. This later developed into a classicising style called Renaissance Latin, which became the basis for Neo-Latin during the early modern period. Latin was taught for both writing and speaking until at least the late 17th century, after which spoken skills declined; today, Contemporary Latin is mostly studied for reading rather than speaking. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the official language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.

Latin grammar is highly fusional, with inflections for case, number, person, gender, tense, mood, voice, and aspect. The Latin alphabet comes directly from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets.

Several phases of the language have been identified, each marked by subtle differences in vocabulary, usage, spelling, and syntax. There is no strict classification; scholars emphasise different features, leading to variations and alternative names. Besides historical phases, Ecclesiastical Latin refers to styles used by Roman Catholic writers from late antiquity onward, as well as by Protestant scholars.

Old Latin, also called Archaic or Early Latin, is the earliest known form, spoken from the Roman Kingdom (traditionally founded in 753 BC) through much of the Roman Republic until 75 BC, before Classical Latin. It appears in inscriptions and early literary works like the comedies of Plautus and Terence. The Latin alphabet was adapted from the Etruscan alphabet, and writing changed from right-to-left or boustrophedon to strictly left-to-right.

Classical Latin emerged during the late republic and early empire, from about 75 BC to AD 200. It was a deliberate creation by orators, poets, historians, and other literate men who produced the great works of classical literature, taught in grammar and rhetoric schools. Modern instructional grammars trace back to these schools, which acted as an informal language academy for educated speech.

Philological analysis of Archaic Latin works, such as those of Plautus, reveals an informal register called Vulgar Latin (termed *sermo vulgi* by Cicero). Some 19th-century linguists thought this was a separate language parallel to literary Latin, but that view is now widely rejected. The term 'Vulgar Latin' is hard to define, covering both informal speech at any point in Latin's history and the post-Imperial informal Latin that diverged from written norms and led to the Romance languages. During the Classical period, informal language was rarely written, so philologists rely on individual words and phrases from classical authors, curse tablets, and graffiti. In the Late Latin period, more texts show spoken, non-classical changes. Since Vulgar Latin developed freely, it was not uniform across time or place; Romanised populations created their own dialects, eventually leading to the differentiation of Romance languages.

Late Latin is a written form used from the 3rd to 6th centuries, diverging more quickly from Classical Latin. It features more prepositions and word order closer to modern Romance languages, while grammatically keeping most of the same formal rules as Classical Latin. Ultimately, Latin split into a distinct written form, with the commonly spoken version seen as a separate language—for example, early French or Italian.