Romance languages

Romance
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
	; Countries where Romance languages are official (dark orange) or national/secondary (light orange)
	; Romance languages in the world:; – French; – Spanish; – Portuguese; – Italian; – Romanian; Lighter colors mean that the language is not official, but important

The Romance languages (also sometimes called Romanic 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.

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 and lost most of the complex case structure of classical Latin.

The area that the Romance languages are spoken in Europe is mostly extent of 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 The Greek language superseded Latin in the Eastern Roman Empire.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[change | change source]

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 biggest in the world, and in total, there are 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 mainly in Spain and Latin America. 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. Romanian is spoken in Romania and Moldova.