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The Romance languages, also known as the Latin [2] or Neo-Latin [3] languages, are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin. [4] They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are:
European extent of Romance languages in the 20th century Eastern and Western Romance areas split by the La Spezia–Rimini Line; Southern Romance is represented by Sardinian as an outlier. Romance languages in the World. Countries and sub-national entities where one or more Romance languages are spoken.
The Romance languages evolved from varieties of Vulgar Latin spoken in the various parts of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity. Latin was itself part of the (otherwise extinct) Italic branch of Indo-European. [citation needed] Romance languages are divided phylogenetically into Italo-Western, Eastern Romance (including Romanian) and Sardinian.
The Southern Romance languages are a primary branch of the Romance languages. According to the classification of linguists such as Leonard (1980) and Agard (1984), the Southern Romance family is composed of Sardinian , Corsican , and the southern Lucanian dialects.
Neolatino Romance (or simply 'Neolatino') [37] [38] is a naturalistic pan-Romance zonal auxiliary language, proposed as a standard language for Romance as a whole, to ease communication amongst or with speakers of Romance languages, complementing (not substituting) the standards that exist locally (Portuguese, Spanish, etc.).
Today the four most widely spoken standardized Western Romance languages are Spanish (c. 486 million native speakers, around 125 million second-language speakers), Portuguese (c. 220 million native, another 45 million or so second-language speakers, mainly in Lusophone Africa), French (c. 80 million native speakers, another 70 million or so ...
The term Latin Europe is sometimes used in reference to European nations and regions inhabited by Romance-speaking people. [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ] Latin America is the region of the Americas that was colonized by Latin Europeans, and came to be called so in the 19th century. [ 18 ]
Some Romance languages form plurals by adding /s/ (derived from the plural of the Latin accusative case), while others form the plural by changing the final vowel (by influence of Latin nominative plural endings, such as /i/) from some masculine nouns. Plural in /s/: Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, [25] Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian ...