Roman graffiti from Herculaneum and Pompeii in particular shed some light on early vulgar Latin, suggesting that already that the regional homogeneity of the vu

Roman graffiti from Herculaneum and Pompeii in particular shed some light on early vulgar Latin, suggesting that already that the regional homogeneity of the vulgar register was already breaking down by the time of the Plinian eruption. Given the large volume of uncovered graffiti, it is fairly easy to discern several trends, notably the loss of written dipthongs (æ->e, oe->e; comparably au->o), losses of final unaccented consonants and medial vowels. http://ancientgraffiti.org/about/ http://ancientgraffiti.org/about/ is an excellent resource specifically for Herculaneum and Pompeii, but it also links to broader collections to which the project has contributed. There are interesting aspects of graffiti throughout the Roman Empire. Children (or exceptionally short adults) practised writing on walls; some taller people's graffiti showed not just literacy but familiarity with Virgil and even decent command of Greek and other second languages. Conversely, numerous graffiti are supporting evidence for partial Latin literacy among speakers of other languages, even among celtic-language informal epigraphers in the west and northwest in the first decades CE. It seems likely that these influences "accented" day-to-day Latin, perhaps comparably to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish . A couple of centuries later and one could see a clear split between the classical register and early Vulgar Latin. Appendix Probi is interesting, and some examples are listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#Evidence_of_changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#Evidence_of_chang... which also draws some comparisons with Romance languages. (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_Probi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_Probi )