Spoken Latin

An underappreciated hobby language

• Why Latin?
• How I got into Latin
• What’s fun about speaking Latin?
  • Finding words for modern concepts
  • Small talk, elevated
  • Old books as conversation partners
• How can you learn Latin?

Normally this is a programming blog, but here’s something different.

My justification is April Cools’ Club, which henceforth will allow me once a year to write about something completely random (something I’ve done before without knowing it was excusable).

My inspiration was the Spring 2026 Lobsters blog carnival, where participants are provoked to defend the superiority of our favorite language. I accept the challenge, and I step forward to defend the honor of…

Latin.

Specifically, spoken Latin as a hobby language.

Why Latin?

tl;dr: because it has the unusual combination of being:

• no one’s native language, so everyone is a learner.
• a historical language, with texts ranging from two thousand years old to contemporary.
• fairly accessible due to the amount of learning materials available, many in the public domain.
• popular enough that you can join Latin enthusiast communities online or in person, possibly even in your city.
• a spoken language, among said enthusiast communities.

Combined, these make for a fun learning experience.

Note that I’m not arguing based on any value judgment of traditional Western culture. To enjoy Latin, you don’t have to be Catholic, or into philosophy. You don’t even have to be a huge book nerd. I barely was, when I got into Latin.

How I got into Latin

I wasn’t a reader growing up, but in my sophomore year of college I started reading voraciously and, oblivious to future employment possibilities, changed my major from electrical engineering to English literature.

On a whim, I took Ancient Greek for my language electives. I loved Greek. I couldn’t get enough of it. So I joined the forum Textkit, where I discovered that Latin is actually spoken—today!—by some aficionados of the language. (Later I learned that such communities exist for Ancient Greek as well.)

It was decided: I would teach myself Latin and find some Latin-speaking enclave where I’d spend the rest of my days.

You think I’m joking, but I did, in fact, find a Latin-speaking enclave, a sort of Latin immersion program, the Institutum Studiis Latinis Provehendis at the University of Kentucky, of all places. For three magical years I took courses in Latin, hung out in the TA office chatting in Latin, and even lived in the domus Latina, “Latin house”, with a few classmates, where we spoke only Latin except on the (obviously rare) occasion that we had guests. I probably would’ve stayed forever, except that grad school unfortunately isn’t a permanent occupation.

Then, after a few years of teaching, I came to the realization that herding teenagers in a classroom was giving me little enjoyment and far too little pay. Plus, the “classical education” movement, to which Latin owes its renewed popularity among U.S. schools, turned out not to be my cup of tea. That’s when I quit teaching and got into tech.

Today, I don’t read as much Latin as I’d like to. But speaking Latin is a different story. I still live in Kentucky, so on free weekends I still attend cena Latina (Latin dinner) with the University of Kentucky students and faculty. In free summers, I go to the week-long Latin workshop organized by that same faculty.

The most special part of all is that every day when I’m out on a walk with my toddler, I talk with him in Latin: about animals and trees, cars and trucks, litter that we pick up off the ground. He rarely uses Latin words himself; he speaks in a mixture of English and Portuguese, the languages that he hears far more often. But he tracks our walking conversations just fine, and these conversations don’t feel any less natural for one side being in Latin.

What’s fun about speaking Latin?

Finding words for modern concepts

You may reasonably assume that speaking an ancient language today is difficult because of missing modern terminology, but that’s actually not much of a problem. The reason is that ever since antiquity, Latin speakers and writers have taken a consistent approach to describing new things: simply name it in Latin (or Greek).

Let’s say you’re telling someone about your week in Latin, and you reach a moment where you need to describe some modern thing that simply didn’t exist and couldn’t have been imagined in the ancient world. What to do?

If there’s an existing word or phrase for something similar, use that: for example, typis exprimere meaning “to print” (Neo-Latin Lexicon). Greek borrowings are fine, such as telephonum (Neo-Latin Lexicon, Wiktionary—speaking of which, did you know there’s a Latin Wikipedia?).

If no proper term comes to mind, then circumlocution always works. Spending a whole minute describing some modern idea or technology when you could have said one English word to your interlocutor (who also speaks English) isn’t most efficient way to communicate, but I doubt the reason you’ve read this far is that you’re interested in learning a more efficient language.

Small talk, elevated

Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur. “Whatever is said in Latin seems profound.”

According to the Wiktionary entry for this phrase, it is “used to mockingly describe people who seem to use Latin phrases and quotations only to make themselves sound more important or ‘educated’.”

However, among Latin speakers this dictum is equally true in an unironic way: talking about the weather and other trivialities becomes highly enjoyable.

Old books as conversation partners

Many of the points I’ve brought up so far are not exclusive to Latin; if you’re part of (for example) a Spanish learners’ group where no one is a native speaker, then similar dynamics are at play.

But here’s something that’s not true of modern languages: being able to read millennia-old books in the same language that you speak, and consequently feeling that the ancient (or medieval, or early modern) text in front of you is just another conversation partner. It’s a delightful effect.

Of course, classical Latin is not as easy to parse as typical spoken Latin. But spoken Latin is closely based on its classical counterpart in a way that is very rare among spoken languages.²

So not only does speaking Latin improve my reading ability, but it actually motivates me to read more, in order to find words and turns of phrase that I can use in speech. Latinitas, “Latin-ness” of writing and speech, becomes an end unto itself. In this and many other ways, Latin has helped me appreciate and enjoy language like nothing else has.

How can you learn Latin?

It’s very possible to teach yourself Latin. If you want to speak Latin, you should find a group. And even if speaking is not your ultimate goal, it’s still useful as a way to become more fluent, and hence improve your reading. Here’s a list of communities and other learning resources that I’ve gathered over the years.

Have fun!

Footnotes

1. Modern Standard Arabic is the closest I can think of. There is a whole category of languages like this that were at one point “frozen in time” and became a literary lingua franca while regional dialects continued to evolve (in the case of Latin, into the modern Romance languages). For more on this phenomenon, see diglossia. How this happened for Latin is explained in the book Latin: Story of a World Language by Jürgen Leonhardt (see also this lecture by the author). ⏎