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This spoken Latin differed from the literary language of classical Latin in its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some features of Vulgar Latin did not appear until the late Empire. Other features are likely to have been in place in spoken Latin, in at least its basilectal forms, much earlier. Most definitions of "vulgar Latin" mean that it is a spoken language, rather than a written language, because the evidence suggests that spoken Latin broke up into divergent dialects during this period, and because no one phonetically transcribed the daily speech of any Latin speakers during the period in question, students of vulgar Latin must study it through indirect methods.
Our knowledge of Vulgar Latin comes from three chief sources. First, the comparative method can reconstruct the underlying forms from the attested Romance languages, and note where they differ from classical Latin. Second, various prescriptive grammar texts from the late Latin period condemn linguistic errors that Latin users were likely to commit, providing insight into how Latin speakers used their language. Finally, the solecisms and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in late Latin texts also shed light on the spoken language of the writer.
Vulgar Latin, as in this political graffiti at Pompeii, was the language of the ordinary people of the Roman Empire, distinct from the Classical Latin of literature.
The name "vulgar" simply means "common": it derives from the Latin word vulgaris, meaning "common," or "of the people". "Vulgar Latin" to Latinists has a variety of meanings.
Some literary works in a lower register of language from the Classical Latin period also give a glimpse into the world of Vulgar Latin. The works of Plautus and Terence, being comedies with many characters who were slaves, preserve some early basilectal Latin features, as does the recorded speech of the freedmen in the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius Arbiter.
Vulgar Latin developed differently in the various provinces of the Roman Empire, thus gradually giving rise to modern French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, etc. Although the official language was Latin, Vulgar Latin was what was popularly spoken until the new localized forms diverged far enough from Latin that a new standard language became a clear necessity. Obviously Vulgar Latin is considered lost when the local dialects start collecting enough local characteristics to form a different language. They evolved into Romance languages when an independent value was recognisable in them (eg. Oïl, Oc, Si).
The third century AD is presumed to be the age in which, apart from declensions, much vocabulary was changing (i.e., equus → caballus, etc.). Recently, some studies (which still perhaps need more scientific development) have suggested that pronunciations too started to diverge, supposedly with already a similarity to modern local pronunciations, with the most spectacular (alleged) effect in the area of Naples. However, these changes were obviously not uniform in the Empire's territory, so the greatest differences were perhaps to be found among different forms of Vulgar Latin in different areas (also due to the acquisition of newer "local" roots), even if it should be noted that most of theory is based on reconstruction a posteriori rather than, evidently, on texts (poor people could use poor supports, of which poor remains could last for a direct knowledge in our age).
For several centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Vulgar Latin continued to coexist with written Late Latin: for when people who spoke one of the Romance vernaculars set out to write using proper grammar and spelling, what they put down was language that at least paid lip service to the norms of classical Latin. However, at the third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language in order to be comprehensible — either the rustica lingua romanica, Vulgar Latin now recognisably distinct from the frozen Church Latin; or German. This could be a documented moment of the evolution. Within the space of a lifetime after the Council of Tours, in 842, the Oaths of Strasbourg, recording an agreement between two of Charlemagne's heirs, were written down in a Romance language that was obviously not Latin:
Late Latin, still based in Rome, presumedly reflected these acquisitions, recording what was changing in a nearer area — fairly identifiable with Italy. Formal Latin was then "frozen" by the codifications of Roman law on one side ( Justinian) and of the Church on the other side, finally unified by the medieval copyists and since then forever separated from already independent romance vulgar idioms. The written language continued to exist as mediaeval Latin. The Romance vernaculars were recognised as separate languages, and began to develop local norms and orthographies of their own. "Vulgar Latin" ceases to be a useful name for either language.
Vulgar Latin is then a collective name for a group of derived dialects with local — not necessarily common — characteristics, that don't make a "language", at least in a classical sense. It could perhaps be described as a sort of "magmatic" undefined matter that slowly locally crystallized into the several early forms of each Romance language, that consequently find their ultimate proper ancestry in formal Latin. Vulgar Latin was therefore an intermediate point of the evolution, not a source.
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