A Roman scholar’s treatise on the Latin language
De lingua Latina (“On the Latin Language”) is a grammatical and linguistic treatise by the Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro, written in the first century BCE and, in its surviving later books, dedicated to Cicero. It belongs to the tradition of learned antiquarian and grammatical writing that flourished in the late Roman Republic, and it is the earliest substantial Latin work on the language to survive, though only in part: roughly six of its original twenty-five books remain, with the rest known mainly through references and fragments.
The work treats the Latin language systematically, addressing questions of etymology and morphology, and it also engages broader questions about the nature and origin of language itself. Varro discusses whether words arise by nature or by convention, how word forms change and decline, and how usage should be judged. A recurring concern is the tension between analogia (regularity, rule-governed pattern) and anomalia (irregularity, usage and custom), a debate central to ancient grammatical thought. Alongside this, the surviving books preserve a great deal of information about Roman religious, legal, and everyday vocabulary, making the treatise a valuable source for Roman antiquarian learning as well as for the history of linguistics.
Its significance lies chiefly in its place as a foundational text of Latin grammatical study and as a window onto Roman intellectual culture, and it was influential on later Latin grammarians.
