 The Vulgar Latin spoken in the Balkans north of Greece became heavily influenced by Greek and Slavic (Vulgar Latin already had Greek loanwords before the Roman Empire) and also became radically different from Classical Latin and from the proto-Romance of Western Europe.Thus the Latin of classical antiquity changed from being a "living natural mother tongue" to being a language foreign to all, which could not be used or understood even by Romance-speakers except as a result of deliberate and systematic study.If a date is wanted "we could say Latin 'died' in the first part of the eighth century", and after a long period 650–800 A.D. of rapidly accelerating changes.