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Whereas any student can understand that we accurately know the writing usages of the Romans, as well as those of the users of Latin of any other later periods, it is a cause of greater confusion and even scepticism to affirm that we also know with great accuracy the pronunciation of Latin in the different stages of its long history, and in particular in classical times.

It would be too long to explain here how we have come to know the pronunciation of Latin in times for which we have no sound record; but this is a question on which many specialists have worked, and the beginner has to exercise a certain degree of trust in the teacher. We will mention here nevertheless the main instruments that allow us to know how a language like Latin was pronounced in the past.

1. In the first place we’ve got historical and comparative philology. If a Latin word like máter, for instance, has evolved into Italian and Spanish madre, Catalan mare, French mère, Portuguese mãe and in all of those languages without exception the letter m is pronounced the same way, maybe we can hesitate about the pronunciation of the other letters in the word; but we have in principle no reason to think that the m was pronounced any differently in Latin than it is pronounced in all those languages that derive from it. If we then compare Latin not with the daughter languages that evolved from it in later times, but with the sister languages that are related to it because they share an even older common origin, the so called Indo-European languages, and we observe that the letter m has kept exactly the same pronunciation, independently from Latin, into modern Greek μητερα [mi.'tɛ.ra], German Mutter ['mʊ.tʰɐ] and Hindi माता ['mɑ:.tɑ:], which all correspond to Latin máter, then once more we find support to be pretty sure of the way Latin m was pronounced. Similar analogies can be established for all the other letters. Historical and comparative philology can also explain the cases where we observe differences in the related languages, as the presence of an è in French or a u in German where we have á in Latin, and we can thus have an idea of the way in which Latin was and was not pronounced.

But before we proceed with the classical pronunciation of Latin, we need to try and clarify the tremendous confusion that reigns regarding the so called 'ecclesiastical' pronunciation. As it was only natural, after the fall of the Roman empire, Latin, which survived as a learned language, came to be pronounced in every country according to the conventions of the respective vernacular; thus the Latin word lætitia [laɛ̯.'tɪ.tɪ.ʲa] received in Italy the pronunciation [le.'ti.tsja] like the Italian name Letizia, in Spain [le.'ti.θja] like the name Leticia, in England [lə.'tʰɪʃ.ə], etc. (cf. Op. cit., "Appendix B: The pronunciation of Latin in England", pp. 102-110). These traditional pronunciations, varying from one nation to another, were in use in each country in all areas of Latin, both in scholarly contexts and in ecclesiastical ones, of course indistinctively as there was never a conscience that there should be any division between the two. It is wrong to think therefore, as not a few people in modern times have mistakenly been led to believe, that there existed in history a specifically ecclesiastical pronunciation of Latin or that the Italian proununciation would ever have been used by non Italians. Against these varying traditional pronunciations, it’s true, there had been throughout history different erudite initiatives to promote a unified pronunciation of Latin; yet these were not based on the Italian vernacular, but rather on the testimony of the ancient sources, usually understood to support the principle of "one letter one sound" independently of the spelling context, as seemed to be suggested by phonetic descriptions of the letters of the alphabet like the one provided for instance by Martianus Capella in his Dé nuptiís. These erudite unifying tendencies, of course, affected the Latin used both inside and outside the church indistinctly, as for centuries scholars and ecclesiastics were the same people. As a matter of fact, this type of pronunciation was still in use in the court of pope Leo XIII, as anyone who listens to the 1902 recordings of the Italian castrato Professor Alessandro Moreschi can easily perceive (he says [pon.'ti.fi.kem], ['e.ti.am], etc.). Yet these erudite attempts failed for centuries to displace the various national pronunciations that traditionally prevailed in the different countries, both inside and outside the church.

As erudition became increasingly sophisticated, the simple principle of "one letter one sound" was refined by further inspection of the ancient sources, notably by Erasmus and his successors, and the tendency to bring the pronunciation of Latin ever more closely to the one it had in classical times became the main aim of the better educated, who were also ever more disconnected from ecclesiastical milieus. After the fascinating advancement that the science of philology experienced in the last hundred years —scientific comparative philology didn’t really start before the 19th century, with the development of interest in Sanskrit that came along with the European colonization of India—, it was finally possible to recover the classical pronunciation of Latin to remarkable detail. The brilliance of this intellectual achievement of philological science made that in a very short time the unified erudite pronunciation of Latin finally displaced the diverse vernacular traditional pronunciations from all areas of scholarship all over the world (except, partially, in Italy); but as erudition and church now went along completely diverging ways, the different traditional pronunciations prevailed in the ecclesiastical context. This century saw therefore for the first time in history a division between the pronunciation of Latin inside and outside the church, and the birth of the label of 'ecclesiastical' for what was nothing other than the traditional vernacular pronunciations of Latin. As had traditionally been the case, these vernacular pronunciations were still different in the different countries, and in response to the successful internationalisation of the erudite pronunciation, the ecclesiastical authorities started a battle to unify ecclesiastical Latin too; but instead of doing so through the finally thriving unified pronunciation of the erudites, which was in origin no less ecclesiastical than the vernacular ones, they decided to try and spread the traditional pronunciation of one country, Italy, to the rest of the world. Pope Pius X expressed this wish in a letter to the archbishop of Bourges in 1912 (cf. Op. cit., p. 108) and the anhistorical identification of ecclesiastical Latin with the vernacular pronunciation of modern Italian has been spreading since then. Yet even in the 1980s the last Spanish priests I heard using Latin were still firmly sticking to the Spanish pronunciation, and I know well that the vernacular German pronunciation of Latin is still the norm in that country. In any case, the demise of the use of Latin in the church seems to be making both the traditional local pronunciations in general, and the Italian one in particular, equally irrelevant.

Leaving therefore the ecclesiastical Babel behind, we will now proceed to describe the classical pronunciation of Latin —which is sometimes given the name of prónúntiátió restitúta—, as the only authentic standard across borders, and indeed the only thriving one. As said before, the philologist has books available in which they can find lengthier explanations; but the majority of students should have enough with the following. For comparative purposes, British English so-called Received Pronunciation (RP) has been chosen as the standard.