The Romance languages, also known as the Latin languages, are the languages that directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The most prominent Romance languages include Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian and Catalan.
The Romance languages spread throughout the world owing to the period of European colonialism beginning in the 15th century. There are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and parts of Africa. French, Spanish, and Portuguese also have many non-native speakers; they are widely used as lingua francas. There are also numerous regional Romance languages and dialects. All five of the most widely spoken Romance languages are also official languages of the European Union.
Name and languages
The term Romance derives from the Vulgar Latin adverb , "in Roman", derived from : for instance, in the expression , "to speak in Roman" (that is, the Latin vernacular), contrasted with , "to speak in Latin" (Medieval Latin, the conservative version of the language used in writing and formal contexts or as a lingua franca), and with , "to speak in Barbarian" (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the Roman Empire). From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written , or "in the Roman vernacular".
Most of the Romance-speaking part of Europe has traditionally been a dialect continuum, where the speech variety of a location differs only slightly from that of a neighboring location, but over a longer distance these differences become so great that people from two remote locations unambiguously speak separate languages. "(…) we can observe there what is known as a dialect continuum. A village-by-village journey from the west coast of Galicia to the Costa Brava reveals at each stage only small linguistic differences between a particular village and its neigh-bours on either side, (…). Provided one skirts the Basque Country (..), there is no point on the journey where mutual comprehension between speakers from neighbouring villages is threatened, even though speakers will often be aware, sometimes acutely, that their neighbours speak a ittle differently from them. (…)The northern Peninsular dialect continuum is part of a broader Romance continuum which extends in unbroken fashion over all the European territory where descendants of Latin are spoken (with the exception of now-isolated varieties of Romance such as Rumantsch in Switzerland and the various kinds of Romanian used in Romania and other parts of the Balkans)." "This type of situation is known as a geographical dialect continuum. There are many such continua. In Europe, for example, the standard varieties of French, Italian, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese are not really mutually intelligible. The rural dialects of these languages, however, form part of the West Romance dialect continuum which stretches from the coast of Portugal to the centre of Belgium (with speakers immediately on either side of the Portuguese–Spanish border, for instance, having no problems in understanding each other) and from there to the south of Italy (…)." "If one examines the maps depicting the distribution of the Romance languages in Europe, such as those found in most handbooks of Romance linguistics (e.g., Glessgen 2012: 49), one quickly recognizes that Romanian stands like an erratic block in southeastern Europe, surrounded primarily by Slavic idioms (Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian) as well as Hungarian; meanwhile, the remaining Romance languages form a continuum extending from the far southwest of the Iberian Peninsula to the Flemish linguistic boundary in Belgium and as far as Istria in the northeast—a continuum that, in earlier times, even encompassed the Dalmatian coast as far as present-day Dubrovnik." [" Betrachtet man die in den meisten Handbüchern der romanischen Sprachwissenschaft (etwa Glessgen 2012: 49) abgebildeten Karten mit der Verbreitung der romanischen Sprachen in Europa,(…) erkennt man sehr schnell, dass das Rumänische wie ein erratischer Block im Südosten Europas liegt, umgeben vor allem von slavi-Idiomen (Bulgarisch, Serbisch, Ukrainisch) sowie dem Ungarischen, während die übrigen romanischen Sprachen ein Kontinuum bilden, das vom äußersten Südwesten der iberischen Halbinsel bis an die flandrische Sprachgrenze in Belgien und bis Istrien im Nordosten reicht, früher sogar noch die dalmatinische Küste bis zum heutigen Dubrovnik umfasste."] This makes drawing language boundaries difficult, and thus there is no unambiguous way to divide the Romance varieties into individual languages. Even the criterion of mutual intelligibility can become ambiguous when it comes to determining whether two language varieties belong to the same language or not.
The following is a list of groupings of Romance languages, with some languages chosen to exemplify each grouping. Not all languages are listed, and the groupings should not be interpreted as well-separated genetic clades in a tree model: Ibero-Romance: Portuguese, Galician, Asturleonese (including Asturian, Leonese and Mirandese), Spanish, Aragonese, Judaeo-Spanish, Mozarabic/Andalusi Romance (extinct since the late 13th century) Occitano-Romance: Catalan (including Valencian), Occitan Gallo-Romance: Oïl languages (including French), Franco-Provençal (also known as Arpitan) Rhaeto-Romance: Romansh, Ladin, Friulian Gallo-Italic: Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Emilian, Romagnol Venetian (classification disputed) Central Romance: Italian (Tuscan, Corsican, Sassarese, Central Italian), Sicilian/Extreme Southern Italian, Neapolitan/Southern Italian, Dalmatian (extinct in 1898), Istriot Eastern Romance: Daco-Romanian (Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian Southern Romance: African (extinct since the Late Middle Ages), Sardinian (Campidanese, Logudorese) Southern Lucanian (classification disputed)
Modern status
The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries. In Europe, at least one Romance language is official in France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Romania, Moldova, Monaco, Andorra, San Marino and Vatican City. In these countries, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Romansh or Catalan have constitutionally official status.
French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of the European Union. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan were the official languages of the defunct Latin Union; and French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the United Nations. Outside Europe, French, Portuguese and Spanish are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that emerged from the respective colonial empires.
With almost 500 million speakers worldwide, Spanish is an official language in Spain and in nine countries of South America, home to about half that continent's population; in six countries of Central America (all except Belize); and in Mexico. In the Caribbean, it is official in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. In all these countries and territories, Latin American Spanish is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish the most native speakers of any Romance language.
In United States, Spanish is a common language, especially in communities of Hispanic and Latino Americans, with over 45 million total speakers, behind only English as most spoken language of that country; it is spoken most widely in Southwestern states such as California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico (where it has semi-official status), also in Southern Florida, Illinois, and New York.
In Africa, Spanish is the main official language of Equatorial Guinea. Spanish was an official language in the Philippines until 1973 and the present constitution lists it as a "voluntary and optional" language.
Portuguese, in its homeland, Portugal, is spoken by almost the entire population of 10 million. As the official language of Brazil, it is spoken by more than 200 million people, making Portuguese the most spoken official Romance language in a single country. As Portuguese is also spoken in neighboring eastern Paraguay and northern Uruguay, this accounts for slightly more than half the population of South America.
Portuguese is the official language of six African countries (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea, and São Tomé and Príncipe), and is spoken as a native language by perhaps 16 million residents of that continent. In Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages in East Timor and Macau, while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia—some 400,000See Portuguese in Asia and Oceania.—are in Japan due to return immigration of Japanese Brazilians. In North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language, mainly immigrants from Brazil, Portugal, and other Portuguese-speaking countries and their descendants.See list of countries where Portuguese is an official language. In Oceania, Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in East Timor. Its closest relative, Galician, has co-official status in the autonomous community of Galicia in Spain, together with Spanish.
Outside Europe, French is spoken natively most in the Canadian province of Quebec, and in parts of New Brunswick and Ontario. Canada is officially bilingual, with French and English being the official languages and government services in French theoretically mandated to be provided nationwide. In parts of the Caribbean, such as Haiti, French has official status, but most people speak creoles such as Haitian Creole as their native language. French also has official status in much of Africa, with relatively few native speakers but large numbers of second language speakers.
Although Italy also had some colonial possessions before World War II, its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial period. As a result, Italian outside Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia. In some former Italian colonies in Africa—namely Libya, Eritrea and Somalia—it is spoken by a few educated people in commerce and government. It is a co-official language with Portuguese in two municipalities of Brazil (Santa Teresa, Espírito Santo and Encantado, Rio Grande do Sul).