Romance Languages

Romance Languages, group of 47 modern languages derived from the ancient Latin language and spoken by about 400 million people. These languages form a major group in the Indo-European languages, belonging to that family's subfamily of Italic languages. They developed from the colloquial Latin of late Roman times, their separation from Latin becoming evident in the 5th to 9th centuries.

Linguists subdivide the group in various ways, using geographical as much as linguistic criteria. The most recently accepted classification is into the following three sub-groups:

(1) Southern: two subsets consisting of Corsican, spoken in France, and the four Sardinian languages (spoken on the island of Sardinia and isolated from other Romance speech at an early date).

2) Eastern: the four Romanian languages (which evolved from Romanian between AD 500 and 1000) spoken primarily in Romania, Croatia, and Greece.

(3) Italo-Western: the largeset sub-group, containing 38 languages in 2 further subsets: Italo-Dalmation—6 languages including Italian, Sicilian, and the now extinct Dalmatian of Croatia. Western—32 languages with 2 further subsets: the Gallo-Iberian group includes Spanish, Ladino (or Judaeo-Spanish), Portuguese, French, Provençal or Occitan (in southern France) and other regional French languages, Catalan (in Catalonia and Valencia in Spain; official language of Andorra), some Italian languages including Venetian, and the Rhaeto-Romanic group (Romansch, in Switzerland; Ladin and Friulian, in northern Italy). The other subset, Pyranean-Mozarabic, consists of two languages in two separate branches: Aragonese is a Spanish language with official status in the region where it is spoken; Mozarabic is an extinct Spanish language still used liturgically by a few churches.

See also Catalan Language; French Language; Italian Language; Language; Norman French Language and Literature; Portuguese Language; Provençal Language; Rhaeto-Romanic Languages; Romanian Language; Spanish Language.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.