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Latin

lah-TEE-noom
Also Known As lingua Latina
Romance Languages

Latin is the language of ancient Rome and, through the Roman Empire's expansion, the ancestor of the Romance languages, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and others. Classical Latin, the literary standard of authors such as Cicero and Virgil, coexisted with a more variable spoken Vulgar Latin whose regional divergence, over the centuries following the Western Empire's collapse, gradually produced the distinct Romance languages. Latin itself never disappeared: it continued as the working language of scholarship, law and the Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era, and remains in liturgical and academic use today, so its transition from a spoken vernacular to a written and ceremonial language happened gradually rather than at any single date.

Facts
ISO 639-3 Code
lat 1
Speaker Count
0 2
No remaining native speakers; Latin survives today as a classical and liturgical language.
Status
Liturgical / Learned Use Only 1
Attested From (Year)
from 75 BCE 3
Marks the conventional beginning of the Classical Latin period per the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language's periodization; Latin as a language is considerably older, with inscriptions surviving from the sixth century BCE.
Attested To (Year)
to 750 2
Circa, 8th century CE: source dates the vernacular's evolution into the Romance languages to between the 6th and 9th centuries CE.
Region
Latium (the lower Tiber area around Rome, Italy) 2
Latin
Filter Results3 entries
Connections

Ancestor Of

Neapolitan is a Southern Italo-Romance language that evolved from Vulgar Latin in parallel with Italian, not as a dialect derived from Italian itself.

Source Wikipedia: Neapolitan Language

Sicilian is an Extreme Southern Italian Romance language that developed from the Vulgar Latin introduced to Sicily under Roman rule, a sister development to Italian rather than a derivation from it.

Source Wikipedia: Sicilian Language

Venetian evolved from Vulgar Latin as a sister language of Italian, not as a dialect of Italian.

Source Wikipedia: Venetian Language

Associated With

English, Languages

This source names Latin directly: "everyday vocabulary is of French or Latin origin."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)
Greek Script, Scripts

This source names Latin directly: "and from the Etruscans to the Latin alphabet, and passed north into the medieval Balkans and Eastern Europe through the Byzantine Greek uncial script adapted by ninth-century missionaries..."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)
Hangul, Scripts

This source names Latin directly: "than strung letter by letter as in the Latin alphabet."

Source Omniglot: The Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages
Polish, Languages

This source names Latin directly: "language of Poland, written in the Latin alphabet with a set of diacritics that mark sounds the plain Latin letters do not cover."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)
Priscian, Linguists

This source names Latin directly: "The split between Cyrillic-writing and Latin-writing Slavic languages runs along confessional lines rather than branch lines: Orthodox-majority Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic and..."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)
Spanish, Languages

This source names Spanish directly: "the ancestor of the Romance languages, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and others."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)
Spanish, Languages

This source names Latin directly: "Romance language descended from Vulgar Latin as spoken on the Iberian peninsula, spread worldwide from the sixteenth century onward by Spanish colonization and today the official language of twenty..."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

This source names Latin directly: "that Sanskrit bears to Greek and Latin a resemblance too strong to be accidental, in both grammatical structure and root vocabulary, and proposed that all three, along with Gothic, Celtic and Old..."

Source The Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic SocietyWilliam Jones

This source names Latin directly: "His study of Sanskrit alongside his existing knowledge of Greek and Latin led him to argue, in a 1786 address to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, that the three languages shared a common ancestor no..."

Source The Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic SocietyWilliam Jones

In Family

Source Glottolog

Written In

Latin Script, Scripts
Source Omniglot: The Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages
Sources
1. Ethnologue: Languages of the World
SIL International, 2024View the Source
2. Wikipedia: Latin
Wikipedia
  • lead section
    Ecclesiastical Latin remains the official language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.
  • Quote
    [ɫaˈtiːnũː]
View the Source
3. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
David Crystal (editor), Cambridge University Press, 2010
Glottolog
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary AnthropologyIn Family: Indo-EuropeanView the Source
Omniglot: The Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages
Written In: Latin ScriptView the Source
Wikipedia: Neapolitan Language
Wikimedia FoundationAncestor Of: Neapolitan, Classification section
Quote, Ancestor Of: Neapolitan, Classification section
Its evolution has been similar to that of Italian and other Romance languages from their roots in Vulgar Latin.
View the Source
Wikipedia: Sicilian Language
Wikimedia FoundationAncestor Of: Sicilian, Phonology section
Quote, Ancestor Of: Sicilian, Phonology section
A further range of consonantal sound shifts occurred between the Vulgar Latin introduced to the island following Roman rule and the subsequent development of the Sicilian language.
View the Source
Wikipedia: Venetian Language
Wikimedia FoundationAncestor Of: Venetian, History section
Quote, Ancestor Of: Venetian, History section
Like all members of the Romance language family, Venetian evolved from Vulgar Latin, and is thus a sister language of Italian and other Romance languages.
View the Source
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