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Today the four most widely spoken standardized Western Romance languages are Spanish (c. 410 million native speakers, around 125 million second-language speakers), Portuguese (c. 220 million native, another 45 million or so second-language speakers, mainly in Lusophone Africa), French (c. 80 million native speakers, another 70 million or so ...
Number of native speakers of each Romance language, as fractions of the total 690 million (2007) The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries.
French ( français, French: [fʁɑ̃sɛ], or langue française, French: [lɑ̃ɡ fʁɑ̃sɛːz]) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul.
Western Romance languages Main article: Western Romance languages Based on mutual intelligibility , Dalby lists a dozen languages: Portuguese , Spanish , Asturian-Leonese , Aragonese , Catalan , Gascon , Provençal , Gallo-Wallon , Piedmontese , Ligurian , Lombard , French , Arpitan (or Franco-Provençal) , Romansh , and Ladin .
Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, English, French, Italian, and German. Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe, [4] and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. (See English language in Europe .)
Today the four most widely spoken standardized Western Romance languages are Spanish (c. 410 million native speakers, around 125 million second-language speakers), Portuguese (c. 220 million native, another 45 million or so second-language speakers, mainly in Lusophone Africa ), French (c. 80 million native speakers, another 70 million or so sec...
The West group split into a Gallo-Romance group, which became the Oïl languages (including French), Gallo-Italian, Occitan, Franco-Provençal and Romansh, and an Iberian Romance group which became Spanish and Portuguese.
