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Like all Romance languages, the Iberian Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin, the nonstandard form of the Latin language spoken by soldiers and merchants throughout the Roman Empire. With the expansion of the empire, Vulgar Latin came to be spoken by inhabitants of the various Roman-controlled territories. Latin and its descendants have been spoken in Iberia since the Punic Wars, when the Romans conquered the territory.

This list points to common traits of these Iberian subsets, especially when compared to the other Romance languages in general. Thus, changes such as Catalan vuit/huit and Portuguese oito vs. Spanish ocho are not shown here, as the change -it- > -ch- is exclusive to Spanish among the Iberian Romance languages.

Politically, there are four major officially recognised Iberian Romance languages: 1. Spanish, is the national and official language of 21 countries, including Spain. Spanish is the fourth-most widely spoken language in the world, with over 570 total million speakers, and the second-most widely spoken native language. It has a number of dialects and varieties. 2. Portuguese, official language in nine countries including Portugal and Brazil. After Spanish, Portuguese is the second most widely spo

The Iberian Romance languages are a conventional group of Romance languages. Many authors use the term in a geographical sense although they are not necessarily a phylogenetic group. Phylogenetically, there is disagreement about what languages should be considered within the Iberian Romance group; for example, some authors consider that East Iberian, also called Occitano-Romance, could be more closely related to languages of northern Italy. A common conventional geographical grouping is the foll

The Gallo-Romance group includes: 1. The Oïl languages. These include French, Orleanais, Gallo, Angevin, Tourangeau, Saintongeais, Poitevin, Bourgignon, Picard, Walloon, Lorrain and Norman. 2. Franco-Provençal, of middleeastern France, western Switzerland, and Aosta Valley region of northwestern Italy. Formerly thought of as a dialect of either Oïl or Occitan, it is linguistically a language on its own, or rather a separate group of languages, as many of its dialects have little mutual ...

How far the Gallo-Romance languages spread varies a great deal depending on which languages are included in the group. Those included in its narrowest definition were historically spoken in the north of France, parts of Flanders, Alsace, part of Lorraine, the Wallonia region of Belgium, the Channel Islands, parts of Switzerland, and northern Italy. Today, a single Gallo-Romance language dominates much of this geographic region and has also spread overseas. At its broadest, the area also encompas

The group covers the languages of the southern part of France, eastern Spain, together with Andorra, Monaco, parts of Italy, and historically in the County of Tripoli and the possessions of the Crown of Aragon. The existence of this group of languages is discussed on both linguistic and political bases.

According to some linguists both Occitan and Catalan/Valencian should be considered Gallo-Romance languages. Other linguists concur as regarding Occitan but consider Catalan and Aragonese to be part of the Ibero-Romance languages. The issue at debate is as political as it is linguistic because the division into Gallo-Romance and Ibero-Romance languages stems from the current nation states of France and Spain and so is based more on territorial criteria than historic and linguistic criteria. One

Most linguists separate Catalan and Occitan, but both languages have been treated as one in studies by Occitan linguists attempting to classify the dialects of Occitan in supradialectal groups, such is the case of Pierre Bec and, more recently, of Domergue Sumien. 1. Supradialectal classification of Occitano-Romance according to P. Bec 2. Supradialectal classification of Occitano-Romance according to D. Sumien Both join together in an Aquitano-Pyrenean or Pre-Iberian group including Catalan, Gas