At first, Latin was commonly accepted as the written norm. The spoken forms were regarded as less careful and less correct forms of the same language.

In the ninth century, the first attempts at writing the spoken forms revealed Romance languages as different ones from Latin. As new states came into being, their particular dialect acquired prestigious position and became national languages, such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian.

Some general statement related to the evolution from Latin to Romance languages can be made:

1) Nouns and adjectives -

The case system is abandoned, retaining only the singular and plural forms.

The Masculine, Feminine and Neuter genders were reduced to two by the loss of the neuter.

The inflected forms of the degrees of comparison in adjectives and adverbs were replaced by phrases with plus or magis.

The inflected Latin adverb was replaced by the Latin ablative -mente

The indefinite and definite articles were introduced, utilising the Latin unus, ille.

2) Verbs -

The four conjugations were reduced to three.

The whole inflected passive was lost.

The future and future perfect and the pluperfect indicative disappeared.

Beside the Latin perfect a new past tense was formed with the present of habere or tenere plus the past participle.

3) Vocabulary -

The Romance languages never lost the sense of being connected with Latin. They continued to draw new vocabulary from book Latin, and from each other, as they developed into cultivated literary languages in the course of the Middle Ages.