What is colloquial Latin? What is literary Latin? ‘Literary’ is a famously contested term, and ‘colloquial’ is no less fraught with difficulties. Not only is its precise meaning unclear, but it is laden with value judgements: some consider it a pejorative term and others a positive one. The word has become involved in the social struggle over the relative value of different varieties of language and as such has been given a wide range of different implications and connotations over the centuries, some complementary and others contradictory. In order to use this word in scholarly discourse, one first needs not only to determine what it means, but also to explain how one's usage resembles and differs from that of others who have used the same term.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Fowler and Fowler 1995) defines ‘colloquial’ as ‘belonging to or proper to ordinary or familiar conversation, not formal or literary’ while defining ‘literary’ as ‘of, constituting, or occupied with books or literature or written composition, esp. of the kind valued for quality of form… (of a word or idiom) used chiefly in literary works or other formal writing’. Such definitions tell us a number of different things about the way these terms are normally used:

1. – ‘colloquial’ and ‘literary’ refer to registers, with literary being a higher, more formal, register than colloquial;

2. – they are defined in part by opposition to each other, as is often the case with registers;

3. – they are genre-dependent, each being proper to particular genres of communication;

4. […]