The Romance languages areall the related languages derived from Vulgar Latin and form a subgroupof the Indo-European language family.
The Romance languages include Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanianand many others.
The Romance languages developedfrom Vulgar Latin in the 6th- 9th centuries. Today, they arespoken by more than 800 million native speakers worldwide and a large number ofnon native speakers.
Because of difficulty in distinguishingvariety, and dialect, it is impossible to count the number of Romance languagesnow in existence; the number of living Romance languages is estimated at about25.
The Romance languages most prominentlyspoken today are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian. Many ofthese languages have large numbers of non-native speakers; especially Frenchwhich is used throughout West Africa.
The Romance languages originatefrom the popular Latin spoken by soldiers, settlers and merchants ofthe Roman Empire, and are distinguished from the Classical form spoken by theRoman upper classes, in which thelanguage was generally written. With the expansion of the Empire, Latin becamethe dominant native language in Western Europe.
During the Empire's decline andafter its collapse in the 5th century the varieties of Latin began to divergewithin local areas and evolved into different languages. The empires which wereestablished in Portugal, Spain and France spread their languagesto the other continents.
In the medievalliterature of Western Europe, serious writing was usually in Latin, whilepopular works, often focusing on love, were composed in the colloquial speechand came to be called romances.
BritishRomance and African Romance, the forms of Vulgar Latin usedin southeastern Britain and the Roman province of Africa, whereit had been spoken by much of the urban population, disappeared in the MiddleAges. But the Germanic tribes that had spread to Italy, Gaul, and Hispania eventuallyadopted Latin and the traces of Roman culture, and so Latin remained thedominant language there.
Between the centuries, some local dialects developeda written form and began to replace Latin in many areas where it had been prominent.
The Romance language mostwidely spoken native language is Spanish Portuguese, French, Italian andRomanian, follow all of which are the official languages in at least onecountry. French and Spanish are two ofthe six official languages of the United Nations. French, Portuguese and Spanish arespoken and have official status in various countries that emerged from their colonialempires. French is one of the official languages of Canada, and in Africa,and some islands and it are the official language of Quebec.
Spanish is an official languageof Mexico, much of South America, Central America, the islands ofin the Caribbean and it is the official language of Guinea in Africaand is the most spoken Romance language in the world.
Portuguese is the officiallanguage of Brazil it is the language in five African countries.
Although Italy also hadsome colonial possessions, Italian was spoken only as a minority orsecondary language by immigrant communities especially the other Romancecountries most notably Italy and Spain, and elsewhere such as in Israelwhere it is a native language and by many as a second language. The remainingRomance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact. As aresult, all of these languages are considered endangered. Romance languageshave a number of shared features across all languages:
The Romance languages for themost part have kept the writing system of Latin. However, Romanian before the19th century, literacy was reintroduced through the Romanian Cyrillicalphabet, a Slavic influence. A Cyrillic alphabet was also used for Romanian inthe USSR. The non-Christian populations of Spain also used the scripts oftheir religions Arabic and Hebrew to write Romance.
With the decline of the usage ofthe languages Romance languages may in the future vanish although the number ofpeople in the world does not support this supposition. The romance of the Romance languagescontinues in all parts of the world; to be enjoyed by many. The variations of these languages are passeddown from generation to generation developing into a more universal verbalcommunication for a significant population of the world.
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