What living languages have Latin origin?
Today, 430 million speakers speak a Latin language, which is almost 8% of the world’s population.
The languages spoken in Europe are mostly Indo-European languages , that is, languages that are spoken in Europe and India (from Greek to Sanskrit, through French, Spanish, Occitan or Portuguese).
The Romance languages or Latin languages are numerous, especially in Europe, where the Roman Empire had influence over several centuries, spreading to turn the Roman tongue along the Mediterranean basin.
The popularization of Latin was what originated the rural Roman language, from which the different languages that we know today were differentiated. the languages closest to Latin are the following:
- The Sardinian language (spoken in Sardinia): 8% derivation from Latin
- Italian: 12%
- Spanish: 20%
- Romanian: 23.5%
- Occitan: 25%
- Portuguese: 31%
- French: 44%
There are numerous similarities between these languages, as shown in the table below:
However, these similarities are valid only in written expression. In the oral part, the Latin languages differ greatly from each other and, above all, for the Spanish who also received the influence of the Arabs during their conquest.
There are different groups of Latin based on their similarities:
- The Iberian-Romance group that brings together the different dialect languages, such as Castilian, Andalusian, Portuguese, Galician or Catalan;
- the Occitan-Romance group is made up of the French, the Gascon or the Languedocian;
- the Italo-Romance group includes Italian and all its dialects such as Piedmontese, Lombard, Tuscan or Corsican;
- the Gallo- Romance group brings together all the languages of oil and the dialects of northern France and Belgium: Walloon or Norman, for example;
- the Balkan- Romanic group includes Draco-Roman, present-day Roman, Modalvo, as well as dead languages such as Istro-Romanian or Aromanian. What living languages have Latin origin?
