Language

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 3

Speaker Count

0 2

No remaining native speakers; Latin survives today as a classical and liturgical language.

Status

Liturgical / Learned Use Only 4

Attested From (Year)

from 75 BCE 5

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

Classification

Language Kind

Extinct 1

Official Status

Official Language 2

Wikipedia 'Latin': Ecclesiastical Latin remains the official language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church; checked 2026-09-27.

FAQs

If Latin is a dead language, why do people say it never really died?

Classical Latin stopped changing, but spoken Latin kept evolving into the Romance languages.

Classical Latin counts as dead because its form became fixed and stopped changing. The Latin that ordinary Romans spoke, usually called Vulgar Latin, kept evolving as it spread across the Western Roman Empire, and it gradually became the Romance languages. So the everyday language did not simply vanish; it turned into its descendants.

Connections

Ancestor Of

Neapolitan

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

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

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

Source Wikipedia: Venetian Language

Associated With

Aelius Donatus

English

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

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

Greek Script

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

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

Marcus Terentius Varro

Polish

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

Slavic

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

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

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)

The Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society

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

William 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

Indo-European

Source Glottolog

Written In

Latin Script

Source Omniglot: The Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages

Old Italic Script

In the Other Atlases