Vulgar Latin

Coexisting with this was a variety of dialects that existed only in spoken form--the Latin of the people--collectively known as Vulgar Latin. Much less can be said conclusively about these forms of Latin, as there are limits to their ability to be reconstructed.

The e-o vowel alternations are partly based on direct Vulgar Latin influences, on various Iberian dialectal choices, on neighboring languages reflections, on literal considerations, and on places of settlements.

As is well-known, all Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin, which, in contrast with Classical Latin, was the actual language spoken by the people of the Roman Empire.

Among the topics are Vulgar Latin and Middle Arabic, elements of diglossia in biblical and modern Hebrew, prestige register versus common speech in Ottoman Turkish, Hindi bilingualism and related matters, macaronic texts in the early Irish tradition, and whether dialectical and standard spoken Norwegian comprise a high and low.

This may be a fusion of the foreshortening of the Middle French 'destresse', and Old French estrece "narrowness, oppression", in turn derived from Vulgar Latin *strictia, from L.

The authors have chosen to use the most common definition: "[a] dialect is a 'variant' of a language" and point out that the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Friulian, Sardinian, Romansh, and a few others) "turn out, in effect, to be modern-day 'variants' of Vulgar Latin (VL)" (11).

Spanish is a Romance language; it emerged from Vulgar Latin dialects in the north of the peninsula.