Nowadays, most Latinists learn the "reconstructed classical" pronunciation: an attempt at reconstructing the way Cicero, Caesar, or Vergil might have spoken in formal settings.

However, it seems fairly clear that this *wasn't* how an everyday Roman would have spoken in the forum. For example, Catullus 84 wouldn't make sense if `/h/` was still pronounced in everyday vulgar speech. And later sound changes in Romance, like the loss of vowel length, probably didn't appear out of nowhere at the end of the Empire.

So: what do we know about how an everyday pleb would have spoken on the streets of Rome, somewhere around the first century? [This question](https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/1201/how-did-latin-sound) is unanswered, which I take to mean we don't know enough to make a full recording of it, but scholars certainly must know *something* about this topic.