Languages
Latin
lah-TEE-noom
Also Known As lingua Latina
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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 Speaker CountNo remaining native speakers; Latin survives today as a classical and liturgical language. StatusLiturgical / Learned Use Only 1 Attested From (Year)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)Circa, 8th century CE: source dates the vernacular's evolution into the Romance languages to between the 6th and 9th centuries CE. RegionLatium (the lower Tiber area around Rome, Italy) 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Latin directly: "everyday vocabulary is of French or Latin origin."
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..."
This source names Latin directly: "than strung letter by letter as in the Latin alphabet."
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."
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..."
This source names Spanish directly: "the ancestor of the Romance languages, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and others."
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..."
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..."
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..."
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