Romance languages

The Romance languages (also sometimes called Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages) are a language family in the Indo-European languages. They started from Vulgar Latin (in Latin, vulgar is the word for "common" and so "Vulgar Latin" means "Common Latin"). The most spoken Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian.

Romance
Geographic distribution:	Originally Southern Europe and parts of Northern Africa; now also most of America. Official languages of half the countries in Africa and parts of Oceania.
Linguistic classification:	Indo-European Italic Romance
Proto-language:	Vulgar Latin
Subdivisions:	Italo-Western Eastern Romance Sardinian

They are called "Romance languages" because they originate from Latin, the language spoken by the Western Roman Empire. Their grammatical inflection system has been simplified with the loss of most of the complex case structure of Classical Latin.

The area that the Romance languages are spoken in Europe mostly was in the Western Roman Empire. The Greek language superseded Latin in the Eastern Roman Empire. Latin survived in Romania, whose language, Romanian, is a Romance language. In Moldova, it is sometimes called Moldovan.

Demographics

Percentage of speakers of each Romance language, out of the total speakers of all the Romance languages

The Romance language family is one of the largest in the world have a total of almost a billion first- and second-language speakers.

Spanish is the most widely used Romance language, with Portuguese as the second and then French coming in at third.

Spanish is spoken in Spain, United States, Latin America and some places of Africa. Portuguese is mostly used/spoken in Brazil, Portugal and parts of Africa. French is spoken in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and in some areas of Africa. Italian is spoken in Italy, San Marino, Malta, Switzerland and the Vatican City. Romanian is spoken in Romania and Moldova.

List of Romance languages

Eastern Romance languages

• Romanian
• Moldovan
• Istro-Romanian
• Megleno-Romanian
• Aromanian

Italo-Western Romance languages

• Sardinian

Italo-Dalmatian languages

• Italian
• Neapolitan
• Sicilian

Western Romance languages

Gallo-Iberian languages

• Catalan
• Occitan

Gallo-Romance languages

• French
• Gallo
• Norman
• Auregnais
• Jèrriais
• Sercquiais
• Romansh
• Venetian
• Walloon

Iberian Romance languages

• Asturian
• Galician
• Leonese
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Aragonese

Other

• Ladino

Family tree

Latin

Classical Latin

Vulgar Latin

Continental Romance

Sardinian dialects

Italo-Western Romance

Eastern Romance

Western Romance

Italo-Dalmatian

Balkan Romance

Ibero-Romance

Gallo-Romance

Sicilian

Italian

Neapolitan

Proto-Romanian

Albanian words

Portuguese

Spanish

French

Occitano Romance

Romanian

Aromanian

Occitan

Catalan

Other websites

• Romance languages - Citizendium