Romance languages
Romanesque languages, a set of modern languages that come from Latin and speak some 400 million people. They constitute the most widespread group of the Indo-European family and are part of the Italian subfamily. All of them are an evolution of the vulgar Latin spoken in the late Roman Empire and their separation from the common trunk begins to manifest between the fifth and ninth centuries.
The various language schools subdivide the group according to different criteria, both linguistic and geographical. The most common classification is as follows: 1) insular, the Sardinian (spoken in Sardinia and autonomous from other Romanesque languages since very early times); 2) continental, Balkan -Romanian and Dalmatian now disappeared-, Western European -Italian, Spanish including Ladino or Judeo-Spanish and Mozarabic, Portuguese, French, Provençal or Occitan, Catalan (spoken in Catalonia, Balearic Islands, Valencia and Andorra), Galician and Rhaeto-Romanic (Romansh from Switzerland, Ladino and Friulian from northern Italy).
<em>See also Catalan language; French language; Galician language; Italian language; Language; Norman French languages and literatures; Portuguese language; Provençal language; Rhaeto-Romanic languages; Romanian language and Spanish language.
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