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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.
Flavio Biondo was the first scholar to have observed (in 1435) linguistic affinities between the Romanian and Italian languages, as well as their common Latin origin. [28] The total of 880 million native speakers of Romance languages (ca. 2020) are divided as follows: [29] Spanish 54% (475 million, plus 75 million L2 for 550 million in the ...
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
As the language continued to be used as a classical language, lingua franca and liturgical language long after it ceased being a native language, pronunciation and – to a lesser extent – spelling diverged significantly from the classical standard with Latin words being pronounced differently by native speakers of different languages.
Latin was or is the official language of several. European states. It had official status in the Kingdom of Hungary from the 11th to mid-19th centuries, when Hungarian became the exclusive official language in 1844. [55] The best known Latin language poet of Hungarian origin was Janus Pannonius.
The term was related to the predominance of the Latin Church, which is the largest autonomous particular church within the broader Catholic Church, and took its name from its origins in the Latin-speaking world which had Rome as its center. [7] Latin was generally a negative characterization, especially after the 1054 schism. [4]
Latin became the lingua franca of the early Roman Empire and later of the Western Roman Empire. Despite the decline of the Western Roman Empire, the Latin language continued to flourish in the very different social and economic environment of the Middle Ages, not least because it became the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. In ...
Style of language refers to repeatable features of speech that are somewhat less general than the fundamental characteristics of a language. The latter provides unity, allowing it to be referred to by a single name. Thus Old Latin, Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin, etc., are not considered different languages, but are all referred to by the term ...