A literary language is a register of a language that is used in literary writing. This may also include liturgical writing. The difference between literary and non-literary (vernacular) forms is more marked in some languages than in others. Where there is a strong divergence, the language is said to exhibit diglossia.
Classical Latin was the literary register of Latin, as opposed to the Vulgar Latin spoken across the Roman Empire. The Latin brought by Roman soldiers to Gaul, Iberia, or Dacia was not identical to the Latin of Cicero, and differed from it in vocabulary, syntax, and grammar. Some literary works with low-register language from the Classical Latin period give a glimpse into the world of early Vulgar Latin. The works of Plautus and Terence, being comedies with many characters who were slaves, preserve some early basilectal Latin features, as does the recorded speech of the freedmen in the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius Arbiter. At the third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language — either in the rustica lingua romanica (Vulgar Latin), or in the Germanic vernaculars — since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin.
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... conscious care in the works of literature is felt when it comes to language selection ... In the course of centuries hence the tendency is formed for literary language to be as much as pure and selective as possible ... One thing is the colloquial language, often ridden with foreign words, and entirely different thing is the language of literary works in which tendency for language purity arises ...
... With its seriousness of purpose, its literary stature and the range — both stylistically and subjectwise — of its content, the Comedy soon became a cornerstone in the evolution of Italian as an ... dialects and of the need to create a literature, and a unified literary language, beyond the limits of Latin writing at the time in that sense he is a forerunner of the ... He wrote the Comedy in a language he called "Italian", in some sense an amalgamated literary language mostly based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, but with some ...
... orthographical trends can be identified for these Sámi languages ... be the same as it is for the majority language of that country as its basis ... This trend goes back to the traditions where the Sami language was first being used as a written language, i.e ...
... period, there was a tendency towards a state of diglossia between the Attic literary language and the constantly developing vernacular Koiné ... Christian literature, to a highly artificial learned style, employed by authors with higher literary ambitions and closely imitating the model of classical Attic, in continuation of the movement ... At the same time, the spoken vernacular language developed on the basis of earlier spoken Koiné, and reached a stage that in many ways resembles present-day Modern Greek in terms of grammar and ...
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“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)