Latin language,Indo-European language in theItalic group and ancestral to the modernRomance languages.

Originally spoken by small groups of people living along the lowerTiber River, Latin spread with the increase of Roman political power, first throughoutItaly and then throughout most of western and southern Europe and the central and westernMediterranean coastal regions of Africa. The modern Romance languages developed from the spoken Latin of various parts of theRoman Empire. During theMiddle Ages and until comparatively recent times, Latin was thelanguage most widely used in the West for scholarly and literary purposes. Until the latter part of the 20th century its use was required in the liturgy of theRoman Catholic Church.

The oldest example of Latinextant, perhaps dating to the 7th centurybce, consists of a four-word inscription inGreek characters on afibula, orcloak pin. It shows the preservation of full vowels in unstressed syllables—in contrast to the language in later times, which has reduced vowels. Early Latin had a stress accent on the first syllable of a word, in contrast to the Latin of the republican and imperial periods, in which the accent fell on either the next or second to the last syllable of a word.

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Latin of theClassical period had six regularly usedcases in the declension of nouns and adjectives (nominative, vocative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative), with traces of a locative case in some declensional classes of nouns. Except for thei-stem and consonant stem declensional classes, which it combines into one group (listed ingrammar books as the third declension), Latin kept distinct most of the declensional classes inherited from Indo-European.

During the Classical period there were at least three types of Latin in use: Classical written Latin, Classical oratorical Latin, and the ordinarycolloquial Latin used by the average speaker of the language. Spoken Latin continued to change, and it diverged more and more from the Classical norms in grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary. During the Classical and immediate post-Classical periods, numerous inscriptions provide the major source for spoken Latin, but, after the 3rd centuryce, many texts in a popular style, usually calledVulgar Latin, were written. Such writers asSt. Jerome and St. Augustine, however, in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, wrote good literary Late Latin.

Subsequent development of Latin continued in two ways. First, the language developed on the basis of local spoken forms and evolved into the modern Romance languages anddialects. Second, the language continued in a more or less standardized form throughout the Middle Ages as the language of religion and scholarship; in this form it had great influence on the development of the West European languages.

Evidence for pronunciation of Classical Latin is often difficult to interpret. Orthography is conventionalized, and grammarians’ comments lack clarity, so that to a considerable extent it is necessary toextrapolate from later developments in Romance in order to describe it.

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The most important of theambiguities bears on Latin intonation andaccentuation. The way in which vowels developed in prehistoric Latin suggests the possibility of a stress accent on the first syllable of each word; in later times, however, the accent fell on thepenultimate syllable or, when this had “light” quantity, on the antepenultimate. The nature of this accent is hotly disputed: contemporary grammarians seem to suggest it was a musical, tonal accent and not a stress accent. Some scholars claim, however, that Latin grammarians were merely slavishly imitating their Greek counterparts and that the linking of the Latin accent with syllable vowel length makes it unlikely that such an accent was tonal. Probably it was a light stress accent that was normally accompanied by a rise in pitch; in later Latin, evidence suggests that the stress became heavier.

The system ofsyllable quantity, connected with that ofvowel length, must have given Classical Latin distinctiveacoustic character. Broadly speaking, a “light” syllable ended in a short vowel and a “heavy” syllable in a long vowel (or diphthong) or a consonant. The distinction must have been reflected to some extent in Late Latin or early Romance, for, even after the system of vowel length was lost, light, or “open,” syllables often developed in a different way from heavy, or “closed,” syllables.

Because the system of vowel length was lost after the Classical period, it is not known with any certainty how vowels were pronounced at that period; but, because of later developments in Romance, the assumption is that the vowel-length distinctions were also associated with qualitative differences, in that short vowels were more open, or lax, than long vowels. Standard orthography did not distinguish between long and short vowels, although in early times various devices were tried to remedy that. At the end of theRoman Republic a so-called apex (one form looked somewhat like a hamza [ ʾ ]) often was used to mark the long vowel, but this mark was replaced in imperial times by anacute accent (′ ). In Classical Latin the length system was an essential feature of verse, even popular verse, and mistakes in vowel length were regarded as barbarous. In later times, however, many poets were obviously unable to conform to the demands of classical prosody and were criticized for allowing accent to override length distinctions.

Besides the long vowelsā, ē, ī, ō, ū and the short vowelsă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ educated speech during the Classical period also used a front rounded vowel, a sound taken from Greek upsilon and pronounced rather like Frenchu (symbolized byy in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet—IPA) in words borrowed from Greek; in popular speech this was probably pronounced like Latinŭ, though in later timesī was sometimes substituted. A neutralvowel was probably used in some unaccented syllables and was writtenu ori (optumus, optimus ‘best’), but the latter rendering became standard. A longē, from earlierei, had probably completely merged withī by the Classical period. Classical pronunciation also used somediphthongs pronounced by educated Romans much as they are spelled, especiallyae (earlierai), pronounced perhaps as an openē in rustic speech,au (rustic openō), andoe (earlieroi, Late Latinē).

The Classical Latinconsonant system probably included a series oflabial sounds (produced with the lips) /p b m f/ and probably /w/; adental oralveolar series (produced with the tongue against the front teeth or thealveolar ridge behind the upper front teeth) /t d n s l/ and possibly /r/; avelar series (produced with the tongue approaching or contacting the velum or soft palate) /k g/ and perhaps /ŋ/; and alabiovelar series (pronounced with the lips rounded) /k^w g^w/. The /k/ sound was writtenc, and the /k^w/ and /g^w/ were writtenqu andgu, respectively.

Of these, /k^w/ and /g^w/ were probably single labialized velarconsonants, not clusters, as they do not make for a heavy syllable; /g^w/ occurs only after /n/, so only guesses can be made about its single consonant status. The sound represented byng (pronounced as in Englishsing and represented in the IPA by /ŋ/), writtenng orgn, may not have had phonemic status (in spite of the pairannus/agnus ‘year’/‘lamb,’ in which /ŋ/ may be regarded as a positional variant of /g/). The Latin letterf probably represented by Classical times a labiodental sound pronounced with the lower lip touching the upper front teeth like its English equivalent, but earlier it may have been a bilabial (pronounced with the two lips touching or approaching one another). The so-called consonantali andu were probably not true consonants but frictionless semivowels; Romance evidence suggests that they later became apalatalfricative, /j/ (pronounced with the tongue touching or approaching the hard palate and with incomplete closure) and a bilabial fricative, /β/ (pronounced withvibration of the lips and incomplete closure), but there is no suggestion of this during the Classical period. Some Romance scholars suggest that Latins had a pronunciation like that ofz in modern Castilian (with the tip, rather than the blade, raised behind the teeth, giving a lisping impression); in early Latin it was often weakened in final position, a feature that also characterizes eastern Romance languages. Ther was probably a tongue trill during the Classical period, but there is earlier evidence that in some positions it may have been a fricative or a flap. There were two sorts ofl, velar and palatal (“soft,” when followed byi).

The nasal consonants were probably weaklyarticulated in some positions, especially medially befores and in final position; probably their medial or final position resulted in mere nasalization of the preceding vowel.

In addition to the consonants shown, educated Roman speakers probably used a series of voiceless aspirated stops, writtenph, th, ch, originally borrowed from Greek words but also occurring in native words (pulcher ‘beautiful,’lachrima ‘tears,’triumphus ‘triumph,’ etc.) from the end of the 2nd centurybce.

Another nonvocalic sound, /h/, was pronounced only by educated speakers even in the Classical period, and references to its loss invulgar speech are frequent.

Consonants written double in the Classical period were probably so pronounced (a distinction was made, for instance, betweenanus ‘old woman’ andannus ‘year’). When consonantali appeared intervocalically, it was always doubled in speech. Before the 2nd centurybce, consonant gemination (doubling of sounds) was not shown in orthography but was probably current in speech. The eastern Romance languages, on the whole, retained Latin double consonants (as in Italian), whereas the western languages often simplified them.

Latin reduced the number of Indo-Europeannoun cases from eight to six by incorporating the sociative-instrumental (indicating means or agency) and, apart from isolated forms, the locative (indicating place or place where) into the ablative case (originally indicating the relations of separation and source). The dual number was lost, and a fifth noundeclension was developed from aheterogeneous collection of nouns. Probably before the Romance period the number of cases was further reduced (there were two in Old French—nominative, used for the subject of a verb, and oblique, used for all other functions—andRomanian today has two, nominative-accusative, used for the subject and the direct object of a verb, and genitive-dative, used to indicate possession and the indirect object of a verb), and words of the fourth and fifth declension were absorbed into the other three or lost.

Among verb forms, the Indo-European aorist (indicating simple occurrence of an action without reference to duration or completion) and perfect (indicating an action or state completed at the time of utterance or at a time spoken of) combined, and the conjunctive (expressing ideas contrary to fact) and optative (expressing a wish or hope) merged to form the subjunctive mood. Newtense forms that developed were the future in -bō and the imperfect in -bam; a passive in -r, also found inCeltic andTocharian, was also developed. Newcompound passive tenses were formed with the perfect participle andesse ‘to be’ (e.g.,est oneratus ‘he, she, it was burdened’)—such compound tenses developed further in Romance. In general, themorphology of the Classical period was codified and fluctuating forms rigidly fixed. Insyntax, too, earlier freedom was restricted; thus, the use of the accusative and infinitive inoratio obliqua (“indirect discourse”) became obligatory, and finediscrimination was required in the use of the subjunctive. Where earlier writers might have used prepositional phrases, Classical authors preferred bare nominal-case forms as terser and more exact. Complex sentences with subtle use of distinctive conjunctions were a feature of the Classical language, and effective play was made with the possibilities offered by flexible word order.

In the post-Classical era, Ciceronian style came to be regarded as laboured and boring, and an epigrammatic compressed style was preferred by such writers asSeneca andTacitus. Contemporaneously and a little later, florid exuberant writing—often called African—came into fashion, exemplified especially byApuleius (2nd centuryce). Imitation of Classical and post-Classical models continued even into the 6th century, and there seems to have beencontinuity of literary tradition for some time after the fall of the WesternRoman Empire.

The growth of the empire spread Romanculture across much of Europe andNorth Africa. In all areas, even the outposts, it was not only the rough language of the legions that penetrated but also, it seems, the fine subtleties of Virgilian verse and Ciceronian prose. Research in the late 20th century suggested that inBritain, for instance, Romanization was more widespread and more profound than hitherto suspected and that well-to-do Britons in the colonized region were thoroughly imbued with Roman values. How far these trickled down to the common people is difficult to tell. Because Latin died out in Britain, it is often thought that it had been used only by the elite, but some suggest that it was a result of wholesaleslaughter of the Roman British. It is, however, more likely that the pattern ofAnglo-Saxon settlements was not in conflict with the Romano-Celtic and that the latter were gradually absorbed into the new society.