What living language do scholars believe Latin sounded like?

[raccoon]

Spanish, Italian, French, Rumanian, other?

In the days when it was spoken in real life.

[Swamp Rat]

1. Romanian n/t

[raccoon]

2. Thanks, Swamp Rat.

After some digging around, I found this:

Britannica Sardinian language
Romance language spoken in Sardinia, the most similar to Vulgar Latin of the modern Romance languages. Its only standard form is the sardo illustre, a literary language used mostly for folk verse. Italian is the island's official language, and few literary works exist in Sardinian. The earliest written materials date from c. 1080.

http://www.answers.com/topic/sardinian-language

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. Yes, Sardinian preserves such Latin features as the hard "c" before "i"

and "e," and I believe, some of the archaic Latin declensions.

ON EDIT: I just scanned the Wikipedia article, and it looks as if the pre-Latin vocabulary of Sardinia is related to Basque. Fascinating. But then, older forms of language tend to survive best in areas off the beaten track.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

4. That is fascinating

It makes me wonder if Basque and early Sardinian are related to a language group that perhaps was widespread in Europe before Indo-European arrived.

[Maestro]

8. This is fascinating because I have always heard

that scholars had no idea the origins of Basque. It wasn't until the late 19th century that it was actually written, correct?

[TheBaldyMan]

5. there is a modern latin studies centre based in the Vatican

I remember hearing the director of the centre being interviewed on the radio a few years ago, he was an American priest and spoke latin with an exuberant italian inflection, it sounded very natural and quite musical.
I suppose latin must have been spoken with a variety of accents all over the Roman world. I read somewhere that latin was better preserved in the outlying European provinces because it was used as a legal and formal language rather than an everyday living language, even after the fall of the western empire.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. I've sometimes wondered when people in Rome realized that

their spoken language had changed so much that it was no longer Latin.

I know that Dante was the first Italian to write in Italian, but surely, there must have been people before him who realized that what they heard in church didn't match their everyday languag

[nealmhughes]

7. I think that most Latin scholars agree that some varieties of Sardinian

are the most likely living sound that would be like Classical Latin would be...but then again there are parts of Sardinia that speak Catalan and the pre-Latin people there have influenced as well as the Tuscans...
It is really hard to say, but I would guess that the c was a hard k before e and i, unlike present "Italian."