The romantic languages refer to all languages that descend from Latin, which was the language in ancient Rome. Among these are French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Throughout North and South America, Africa and Europe there are more than 700 million native speakers. Today, the most common romantic language spoken in the world is Spanish with over 400 million speakers.
Vulgar Latin, which was the popular dialect of Latin spoken by Roman soldiers and merchants, differed from the Classical form of Latin spoken by the upper class of Rome. As the Roman Empire expanded, so did the Latin language. Soon it became prominent in Africa, Britain and the Balkans. However, after Rome’s fall in the 5th century, variations on the Latin dialect began to deviate in each local region, eventually becoming languages of their own. Territories established by France, Portugal and Spain began to extend their languages to other continents. Today about 70% of all speakers of Romantic languages reside outside of Europe.
Around the 16th century, the invention of the press stalled the evolution of the Romantic languages. A uniformity of standard languages began to become evident. Politics influenced the dialect and those less favored became obsolete. Because some governments view language diversity as a military liability and a possible spring board for separatist factions, they have encouraged the use of a single language within their country.
However, as equal rights became more of a hot button issue in the 20th and 21st centuries, some of these languages began to regain some of their stature and privileges. However, it is still undetermined if these new-found liberties is enough to halt the regression of lost Romantic languages.
With 200 million speakers, Portuguese comes in second to Spanish as the most commonly spoken romantic language today. Following Portuguese is French, with 100 million speakers. Italian is the next most common with 62 million and Romanian follows with around 26 million.
With almost all languages spoken today diverging from the Indo-European languages, the Romantic languages are far from gone.
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