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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 ...
Romance languages, group of related languages all derived from Vulgar Latin within historical times and forming a subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The major languages of the family include French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, all national languages. Catalan also has taken on a political and ...
May 27, 2024 · European extent of Romance languages in the 20th century 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 ...
L1+L2: c. 100 million in European Russia, 39 million in Ukraine, 7 million in Belarus, 7 million in Poland, 2 million in Latvia, c. 2 million in the European portion of Kazakhstan, 1.8 million in Moldova, 1.1 million in Estonia. Russian at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required).
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 .
(excl. creole languages) Indo-European: Romance: 485 million 74 million: 559 million French (excl. creole languages) Indo-European: Romance: 81 million 229 million: 310 million Modern Standard Arabic (excl. dialects) Afro-Asiatic: Semitic: 0: 274 million: 274 million Bengali: Indo-European: Indo-Aryan: 234 million 39 million: 273 million Portuguese
The evolution of the Romance languages from Latin was significantly shaped by the numerous language contact environments, which resulted from conquest, colonization, and trade. This chapter traces the development of the largest Romance languages throughout Europe, with emphasis on the known or postulated effects of language contact.
