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The Renaissance reinforced the position of Latin as a spoken and written language by the scholarship by the Renaissance humanists. Petrarch and others began to change their usage of Latin as they explored the texts of the Classical Latin world. Skills of textual criticism evolved to create much more accurate versions of extant texts through the ...
The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The Romance languages have more than 900 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas , Europe , and Africa , as well as in many smaller regions scattered through the world.
There was never an official language of the empire, however, Latin and Greek were the main languages. [16] During the early years of the Roman Empire, educated nobles often relied on their knowledge of Greek to meet societal expectations, and knowledge of Latin was useful for a career in the military, government, or law. [17]
Although they lived in independent city-states, they spoke a common language , held common religious beliefs, and extended common rights of residence and trade to one another. [2] Collectively, these Latin states were known as the Latin League .
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:
British Latin or British Vulgar Latin was the Vulgar Latin spoken in Great Britain in the Roman and sub-Roman periods. While Britain formed part of the Roman Empire , Latin became the principal language of the elite and in the urban areas of the more romanised south and east of the island.
Medieval Latin was the form of Literary Latin used in Roman Catholic Western Europe during the Middle Ages.It was also the administrative language in the former Roman Provinces of Mauretania, Numidia and Africa Proconsularis under the Vandals, the Byzantines and the Romano-Berber Kingdoms, until it declined after the Arab Conquest.
Pre-Roman languages of Iberia circa 300 BC. The following languages were spoken in the Iberian Peninsula before the Roman occupation and the spread of the Latin language. Aquitanian (probably closely related to or the same as Proto-Basque) Proto-Basque; Iberian; Tartessian; Indo-European languages. Celtic languages. Celtiberian; Gallaecian