In most cases, people only realized that they were no longer speaking Latin when someone told them so. We usually have only a vague idea when a majority of speakers - even educated ones - would have started to define their spoken language as one essentially different from Latin, or from the Latin spoken elsewhere. But in at least part of the former Roman Empire, that realization had arrived by the early ninth century.

In 813, a church council convened at Tours instructed the clergy to preach their sermons in the rustica lingua romana - i.e., vernacular Latin or Romance - "so that all may more easily understand what is said." This awareness that the vernacular was essentially different from "proper Latin" was probably a product of the linguistic reform movement sponsored by the Carolingian court, which had, by imposing new classically-inspired standards of correctness in Latin, revealed how far everyday speech had deviated from those models.

By the beginning of the eleventh century, there was some sense that the French vernacular was different from the Italian one. The epitaph of Pope Gregory V notes that the late lamented pontiff taught the people "using Frankish, Italian, and Latin" (usus francisca, vulgari, et voce latina). Throughout western Europe, however, most literature continued to be written in Latin for centuries longer. It was only the advent of flourishing vernacular literary traditions (usually tied to the emergence of firmer political structures) that gave rise to really widespread consciousness of the differences between the Romance languages and their dialects.