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French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that specifically is classified under the Gallo-Romance languages.. The discussion of the history of a language is typically divided into "external history", describing the ethnic, political, social, technological, and other changes that affected the languages, and "internal history", describing the ...
Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris) is a blanket term covering vernacular usage or dialects of the Latin language spoken from earliest times in Italy until the latest dialects of the Western Roman Empire, diverging significantly after 500 AD, evolved into the early Romance languages, whose writings began to appear about the 9th century.
Equinoctial France was the contemporary name given to the colonization efforts of France in the 17th century in South America, around the line of Equator, before "tropical" had fully gained its modern meaning: Equinoctial means in Latin "of equal nights", i.e., on the Equator, where the duration of days and nights is nearly the same year round.
The Latin script originated in archaic antiquity in the Latium region in central Italy.It is generally held that the Latins, one of many ancient Italic tribes, adopted the western variant of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BCE [1] from Cumae, a Greek colony in southern Italy – making the early Latin alphabet one among several Old Italic scripts emerging at the time.
With the spread of Western Christianity the Latin alphabet spread to the peoples of northern Europe who spoke Germanic languages, displacing their earlier Runic alphabets, as well as to the speakers of Baltic languages, such as Lithuanian and Latvian, and several (non-Indo-European) Uralic languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian.
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]
They would shift to Latin as their native speech only one century after the Frankish conquest of Gaul, as both they adopted the prestige language of their urban literate elite. This eventual spread of Latin can be attributed to the social migration from the focus of urban power to village-centred economies and legal serfdom. [15] [16] [17]
Latin became the language of conquered areas because local people started speaking it, and not because the population was displaced by Latin-speakers. [24] Latin was not imposed officially on peoples brought under Roman rule. [25] Saint Augustine observed that Romans preferred for Latin to be adopted per pacem societatis, through a social pact ...