Back Romaanse tale Afrikaans Romanische Sprachen ALS ሮማንስ ቋንቋዎች Amharic Luengas romances AN Romanisc spræc ANG لغات رومانسية Arabic ܠܫܢܐ ܪܘܡܐܢܣܝܐ ARC Llingües romániques AST Романиял мацӀал AV Roman dilləri Azerbaijani
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| Romance | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: | Originally Southern Europe and parts of Northern Africa; now also most of America. Official languages of half the countries in Africa and parts of Oceania. |
| Linguistic classification: | Indo-European
|
| Proto-language: | Vulgar Latin |
| Subdivisions: | |
The Romance languages (also sometimes called Romanic languages) are a language family in the Indo-European languages. They started from Vulgar Latin (in Latin, "vulgar" is the word for "common" and so "Vulgar Latin" means "Common Latin"). The most spoken Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian.
They are called "Romance languages" because they originate from Latin, the language spoken by the Western Roman Empire. Their grammatical inflection system has been simplified and lost most of the complex case structure of classical Latin.
The area that the Romance languages are spoken in Europe is mostly extent of the Western Roman Empire. The Greek language superseded Latin in the Eastern Roman Empire. Latin survived in Romania, whose language, Romanian, is a Romance language. In Moldova it is sometimes called Moldovan.