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Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Considered a dead language, Latin was originally spoken in Latium, the lower Tiber area around Rome, Italy. Through the expansion of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian Peninsula and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the early 19th century, when regional vernaculars supplanted it in common academic and political usage—including its own descendants, the Romance languages. For most of the time it was used, it would be considered a dead language in the modern linguistic definition; that is, it lacked native speakers, despite being used extensively and actively.
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The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family.
Romanian is the official and main language of Romania and Moldova. Romanian is part of the Eastern Romance sub-branch of Romance languages, a linguistic group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin which separated from the Western Romance languages in the course of the period from the 5th to the 8th centuries. To distinguish it within the Eastern Romance languages, in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. It is also spoken as a minority language by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania, and by the large Romanian diaspora. In total, it is spoken by 25 million people as a first language.
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References
- ↑ "Gallo-Romance". The Free Dictionary. Retrieved 2024-06-24.
- ↑ Watson, Nicholas (2022-06-21). Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation: Volume 1: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 30. ISBN 978-0-8122-9834-5.
- ↑ Loporcaro, Michele (2018). Gender from Latin to Romance: History, Geography, Typology. Oxford University Press. pp. 206–207. ISBN 978-0-19-965654-7.
- ↑ Dufter, Andreas; Stark, Elisabeth (2017-09-25). Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. p. 101. ISBN 978-3-11-037708-8.
- ↑ Lema, José; Treviño, Esthela (1998-01-01). Theoretical Analyses on Romance Languages: Selected Papers from the 26th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL XXVI), Mexico City, 28-30 March, 1996. John Benjamins Publishing. p. 108. ISBN 978-90-272-3662-3.
- ↑ Jr, Robert A. Hall (1984-01-01). Proto-Romance Morphology: Comparative Romance Grammar. John Benjamins Publishing. ISBN 978-90-272-8014-5.
- ↑ Ledgeway, Adam; Roberts, Ian (2017-03-09). The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax. Cambridge University Press. p. 64. ISBN 978-1-316-72058-5.
- ↑ « Moyen Âge : l'affirmation des langues vulgaires » in the Encyclopædia universalis.
- ↑ Bernard Cerquiglini, La naissance du français, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1991, Que-sais-je ? ; éd. mise à jour, 2007.
- ↑ Conference of Claude Hagège at the historical museum of Strasbourg, p. 5, (read online) Archived 2015-04-08 at the Wayback Machine