The Carmen Arvale is written in a form of Latin so archaic that classicists regard it as one of the most linguistically difficult connected texts to survive from the Latin tradition, preserving verb forms, vocabulary and syntax considerably older than classical literary Latin, and there is reasonable scholarly suspicion, based on textual corruptions in later copies, that the priests of the Arval Brethren themselves, by the time the inscription recording it was made in 218 CE, no longer fully understood every word of the hymn they were ritually required to recite, having preserved its sound through careful priestly transmission across centuries even as its sense had become partly opaque to Latin speakers of their own late imperial period. This makes the Carmen Arvale valuable to historical linguists specifically for what it preserves of an older stage of the Latin language, independent of whatever the Arval Brethren themselves understood it to mean by the time it was inscribed.
The inscription itself is not simply the poem's text but a record of the whole ceremonial occasion, including an instruction that the hymn be repeated three times, and a description of the priests performing the tripudium, a ritual triple step dance, while reciting it, details that give this a fuller ritual stage direction than most ancient hymns in this atlas receive, most of which are transmitted as text alone without comparable instruction for accompanying physical performance surviving alongside them.