Which languages come from Latin?

The family

Linguists call them Romance languages, from Romanicus, Roman. The main members, by region:

• Iberia: Spanish, Portuguese, Galician and Catalan, with Asturian and Aragonese.
• France and Belgium: French, Occitan in the south, Franco-Provençal around Lyon and Geneva, and Walloon.
• Italy and its islands: Italian, with regional tongues such as Neapolitan and Sicilian, plus Sardinian and Corsican.
• The Alps: Romansh in Switzerland, Ladin and Friulian in northern Italy.
• The Balkans: Romanian, with Aromanian and smaller relatives.

How many there are depends on where you draw the line between a language and a dialect. Together they have nearly 900 million native speakers, most of them speakers of Spanish or Portuguese. One branch has died out: Dalmatian, once spoken on the Adriatic coast. Its last known speaker, Tuone Udaina of the island of Krk, died in 1898, after the linguist Matteo Bartoli had recorded what he remembered.

Not Cicero’s Latin

These languages did not grow from the polished Latin of Cicero or Virgil. They grew from the Latin of soldiers, traders, settlers and slaves, which scholars call Vulgar Latin, from vulgus, the common people. A fourth-century list of corrections, the Appendix Probi, catches it in the act. It warns readers to write speculum, not speclum, mirror; oculus, not oclus, eye; auris, not oricla, ear. The mistakes won. They live on in Italian specchio, occhio and orecchio, in Portuguese espelho, olho and orelha, in French oreille.

Everyday words pushed out literary ones. Classical Latin’s word for horse, equus, gave way to caballus, a workhorse or nag. Hence Portuguese cavalo, Spanish caballo, French cheval, Italian cavallo and Romanian cal. Only the mare, equa, survived, as Portuguese égua and Spanish yegua.

How Latin split apart

Latin traveled with Rome’s armies and colonists: into Spain from 218 BC, into Gaul with Caesar’s conquest, into Dacia, today’s Romania, under Trajan in 106. In the eastern half of the empire, Greek was already the common language, so Latin never took root there, except in the Balkans. When the western empire broke up in the fifth century, regional speech drifted further apart.

By 813 the gap was official. A church council at Tours told priests to preach in the “rustic Roman tongue,” because ordinary people no longer understood sermons in Latin. In 842 two grandsons of Charlemagne swore the Strasbourg Oaths before their armies, and a chronicler wrote one version down in early French, the oldest text in that language. Portuguese has its own birth certificate: the will of King Afonso II, of 1214.

Romanian is the surprise. Rome held Dacia for only about 165 years before Aurelian pulled out in the 270s. Yet a Latin language survived there, surrounded by Slavic languages and Hungarian, and it still calls itself română, Roman.

Latin hiding in English

English is a Germanic language, a cousin of German and Dutch, not a Romance one. But after the Norman Conquest of 1066 it took in thousands of French words, and later scholars borrowed straight from Latin. That is why English can say the same thing three ways: kingly from Old English, royal from French, regal from Latin. Albanian, Basque and Maltese also took heavily from Latin and Romance without becoming Romance languages. Even the empire’s fall did not end Latin; it only broke it into pieces, each of which became a language of its own.