Talking About Latin: The History Of The Dead Language

Latin.
The former language of Latium, the Roman Empire, and initially, Italy.

The (Short) History of Latin

Old Latin:

Old Latin is the oldest known form of the language. It was spoken from the Roman Kingdom to the later part of the Roman Republic period. It has been confirmed to be written in inscriptions and even some of the earliest surviving Latin literature. The comedies of Plautus and Terence are examples. Initially, it was used in a right to left format before changing to a left to right format.

Classical Latin

Classical Latin rose during the late republic and the first years of the empire. It was a conscious creation of public speakers (Orators),  poets, historians etc. who wrote classical literature, which was taught in grammar and rhetoric schools. (Rhetoric study is the study of "effective speaking and writing")

Vulgar Latin

During the same time period as Classical Latin was Vulgar Latin. This form of Latin was a lot less formal, meaning it was rare to find it in written form. This meant philologists (people who studied language from oral and written historical sources) were only left with individual words and phrases found as graffiti.

Vulgar Latin then began to diverge into multiple distinct languages by the 9th century. This was when the earliest  Romance began to emerge. They were then restricted down to everyday speech, as Medieval Latin was used for writing.

Medieval Latin

Medieval Latin was the written Latin language used postclassical. The spoken version developed into various Romance languages. This Latin began to spread into places that didn't already speak Latin. 

Renaissance Latin

The Renaissance made Latin a spoken language for a while, by its adoption by the Renaissance Humanists. They tried to preserve many surviving manuscripts. By the 15th century, Medieval Latin had been replaced this form of Latin which had been supported by students of universities, who tried to find out what the classical language had been.

New Latin

During the 'Early Modern Age,' Latin was one of the most important languages in the culture of Europe. Because of this, a lot of books and most of the diplomatic documents were written in Latin until the end of the 17th century. After this, most of those were written in French or other native languages.

Influence on present-day languages

Long story short, Latin has had quite an influence on most modern languages, from English to German to Dutch. To be fair, English does this weird thing where it steals words from other languages just to change them a bit. For example, the word "Library" comes from the Latin word for book.