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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:
language portal; This category and its subcategories are arranged according to Romance languages tree at Ethnologue. Each specific language should go under its own language group, unless it is too hard to establish that group.
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 ...
It also explains why the languages in France (especially standard French) seem to have innovated earlier and more extensively than other Western Romance languages. [17] On top of this, the medieval Mozarabic language in southern Spain, at the far end of the "northwest" group, may have had the "southeast" characteristics of lack of lenition and ...
A cantonal law of 2006 aims to preserve the trilingual (Romansh, Italian, German) character of Grisons. It prescribes that primary schools, public signage and correspondence by the municipal authorities are to be exclusively in the historically predominant language as long as this language is spoken by at least 40% of the population.
An important factor for linguistic contact between Italy and Romania is the similarity between their respective national languages.. Studies on this similarity, and in general on the linguistic concordances of Romanian and its dialects with other Romance languages and dialects, were initiated during the nineteenth century when, with the Transylvanian School, a cultural movement to rediscover ...
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.
Judaeo-Spanish (or Ladino) is also spoken in the Balkan Peninsula, but it is rarely listed among the other Romance languages of the region because it is rather an Iberian Romance language that developed as a Jewish dialect of Old Spanish in the far west of Europe, and it began to be spoken widely in the Balkans only after the influx of Ladino ...