Italic languages
From UniLang Wiki
The Italic Languages
These languages comprise Latin itself and the Romance languages.
The number of Romance languages is difficult to define. This is mainly due to the discussions about many of them that are sometimes counted as languages, sometimes as dialects. The undisputed ones are those that have official status in one or more countries (at least regionally). These are:
- Catalan (in Andorra, Spain, France and Italy)
- French (in France, Canada, et al.)
- Galician (in Spain)
- Italian (in Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, Slovenia and Croatia)
- Occitan (in France, Spain and Italy)
- Portuguese (in Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, et al.)
- Romanian/Moldovan (in Romania, Moldova and Serbia and Montenegro)
- Romansh (in Switzerland)
- Spanish (in Spain, Equatorial Guinea, Mexico, et al.)
Some undisputed ones that do not have official status are:
A number of other idioms are usually considered to be languages of their own, though some linguists may classify them as dialects. These are:
In addition to the languages listed above there are several more idioms that are considered to be languages of their own by some, but are usually seen as dialects, for example:
Romance languages are today spoken by some 620 million people worldwide. The vast majority of those people speak Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, and Italian. After that the number of speakers declines rapidly, and some smaller languages are only spoken by a couple of ten thousand persons.
The Romance languages are somewhat unique in that their common ancestor is well known: they all descend from Latin.
Due to quite different influences during the centuries of separate development after the fall of the Roman empire (in fact, the separation started already before due to the vast area across which the Latin language was spread), today some of the Romance languages differ a lot from each other. For instance, Spanish was influenced by Arabic for several centuries during the Arabic occupation of the Iberian peninsula, French had strong influences from German because of the intensive contact of the peoples (for some time even joined in the Holy Roman Empire), and Romanian was very much affected by its proximity to the Slavic languages.
