Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, originally spoken in southern and eastern Europe and descended from Vulgar Latin, the language of the Ancient Romans. Today, Romance languages are spoken all over the world, those with the most speakers being Spanish, Portuguese and French.

Estimating the number of languages in a language family is difficult because it depends on the definition of 'language', but one estimate puts the membership of the Romance branch at 47 (excluding Latin, with which the Romance languages form a 48-member branch, the Italic group). The family branches further into Eastern, Italo-Western and Southern subdivisions, with Italo-Western the largest - the Eastern branch leads to Romanian, while Corsican and Sardinian comprise the southern Romance languages. Sardinian is somewhat controversially claimed to be closest to the Latin of the Romans in its structure.

The Italo-Western branch does not divide simply into 'Spanish', 'Portuguese', 'French', 'Italian' and a few others. These languages - more accurately, the 'standard' dialects of these languages - just happen to be among the most politically important or most widely-spoken Romance varieties in southern Europe and around the world today, and in linguistic terms their dialects form the ends of much smaller 'twigs' in the Romance language family, intermingled with many others. For example, Provençal is a major language of south-eastern France, but is little-known, especially outside the country, as it lacks political prestige. It may even be mistakenly assumed to be a French dialect, when in fact French and Provençal are very different, with Provençal more closely related to Spanish than it is to French. Similarly, the 'Italian dialects' of northern Italy are closer to French than to modern standard Italian; today's political borders are therefore a poor guide to the membership of the Romance language family.

See also

• Latin language