What are the Romance languages?
Q: What are the Romance languages?
A: The Romance languages are a language family in the Indo-European languages that originated from Vulgar Latin.
Q: Where did the name "Romance languages" come from?
A: The Romance languages are called so because they originate from Latin, the language spoken by the Western Roman Empire.
Q: What are some of the most spoken Romance languages?
A: The most spoken Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian.
Q: What is "Vulgar Latin"?
A: In Latin, "vulgar" is the word for "common" and so "Vulgar Latin" means "Common Latin". It refers to the Latin spoken colloquially during the Roman Empire.
Q: What happened to the grammatical inflection system of Classical Latin in the Romance languages?
A: The grammatical inflection system of Classical Latin has been simplified and lost most of its complex case structure in the Romance languages.
Q: Where in Europe are the Romance languages mostly spoken?
A: The area that the Romance languages are spoken in Europe is mostly extent of the Western Roman Empire.
Q: What happened to Latin in the Eastern Roman Empire?
A: Latin was superseded by the Greek language in the Eastern Roman Empire. However, Latin survived in Romania, whose language, Romanian, is a Romance language. In Moldova, it is sometimes called Moldovan.
