In my lectures I will dwell on five Latin texts written during the late antique period, namely (a) the Expositio totius mundi et gentium, a 6^th century technical treatise presumably translated from a lost Greek source and dealing with geographical and commercial questions, the two oracular texts (b) Sortes Sangallenses and (c) Sortes Sanctorum, both probably composed in France between the 4^th and 5^th c., (d) Sint Benedict’s Regula monachorum, written in Cassino during the first half of the 6^th c. and (e) the Romana composed by the Eastern Roman historian Iordanes in 551 AD. In the discussion and presentation of the texts I will focus on four closely intertwined aspects, i.e., the manuscript tradition and the difficulties in reconstructing the author’s original(s), non-standard linguistic features related to spoken and ‘vulgar’ language, socio-linguistic factors (particularly relevant for (b) and (c)) and non-standard features ascribable to Greek influence (especially in the case of (a)).