Romance is a branch of the Indo-European language family descended from Vulgar Latin, the spoken form of Latin used across the Roman Empire. Its major members, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, are together spoken natively by roughly 900 million people worldwide, making Romance one of the most widely spoken branches of Indo-European.
Facts
RegionWorldwide, chiefly the Americas, Europe and parts of Africa, originating in continental Western Europe under the former Western Roman Empire. 1 Speaker Count Proto-Language StatusNot a reconstructed proto-language in the usual comparative sense: the Romance languages descend directly from Vulgar Latin, a directly attested spoken register of Latin, rather than from an unattested common ancestor inferred by the comparative method. 1 Romance
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Connections
Ancestor Of
Eastern Romance groups Romanian and the other Balkan Romance varieties east of the Spezia-Rimini isogloss line.
Western Romance groups the Ibero-Romance, Gallo-Romance and Rhaeto-Romance languages west of the Spezia-Rimini isogloss line.
Associated With
Descends From
The Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin, the spoken register of the Italic branch's Latino-Faliscan language.
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Romance Languages
Wikimedia FoundationIntroduction, second paragraph
There are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and parts of Africa.
Introduction, first paragraph
The Romance languages, also known as the Latin languages, are the languages that directly descended from Vulgar Latin.
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