Romance languages

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:	Western Romance (or Italo-Western) Eastern Romance Sardinian
	; Countries where Romance languages are official (dark orange) or national/secondary (light orange)
	; Romance languages in the world:; Blue – French; Green – Spanish; Orange – Portuguese; Yellow – Italian; Red – 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 the Latin Language, "vulgar" is the word for "common," so "Vulgar Latin" means "Common Latin"). The biggest Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan. They are called "romance languages" because they originate from a language spoken by Romans.

The area where the Romance languages are spoken in Europe, corresponds well with the extent of the Western Roman Empire. The Greek language superseded Latin in the Eastern Roman Empire, but Latin survived in Romania, whose language, Romanian, is a Romance language.

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 widest used Romance language, then comes Portuguese, and then French.

Spanish is mainly spoken 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 Republic of Moldova.