The Romance languagesoccasionally called the Latin languages or, less often, the Romanic or Neo-Latin languagesare a group

of languages descended from Vulgar Latin. They form a branch of the Italic languages within the Indo-European language family. The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish (386 million), Portuguese (216 million), French (75 million), Italian (60 million), andRomanian (25 million).
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The largest have many non-native speakers; this is especially the case for French, which is in widespread

use throughoutCentral and West Africa, Madagascar, and the Maghreb region. The Romance languages evolved from Latin from the sixth to the ninth centuries. Today, there are more than 800 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in Europe and the Americas and many smaller regions scattered throughout the world, as well as large numbers of non-native speakers, and widespread use as lingua franca.
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Because of the difficulty of imposing boundaries on a continuum, there are various counts of the Romance

languages; Dalby lists 23 based on mutual intelligibility: Galician, Portuguese, Spanish, Asturian-Leonese, Aragonese, Catalan, Gascon, Provenal, GalloWallon, French, FrancoProvenal, Romansh,Ladin, Friulian, Venetian, Lombard, Corsican, Italian, NeapolitanSicilian, Sardinian, Dalmatian, Daco-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Aromanian, andMegleno-Romanian.
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In several of these cases, more than one variety has been standardized, and is therefore considered a distinct language in the popular conception; this is true for example with Asturian and Leonese as well as Neapolitan and Sicilian. Romance languages are the continuation of Vulgar Latin, the popular and colloquial sociolect of Latin spoken by soldiers, settlers and merchants of the Roman Empire, as distinguished from theclassical form of the language spoken by the Roman upper classes, the form in which the language was generally written. Between 350 BC and AD 150, the expansion of the Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language in continental Western Europe. Latin also exerted a strong influence in southeastern Britain, the Roman province of Africa, and the Balkans north of the Jireek Line. During the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and collapse in the fifth century, varieties of Latin began to diverge within each local area at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. The overseas empires established by Portugal, Spain, and France from the fifteenth century onward spread their languages to the other continents to such an extent that about two-thirds of all Romance language speakers today live outside Europe. Despite other influences (e.g. substratum from pre-Roman languages, especially Continental Celtic languages; and superstratum from later Germanic or Slavic invasions), the phonology,morphology, and lexicon of all Romance languages are overwhelmingly evolved forms of Vulgar Latin. However, there are some notable differences between today's Romance languages and their Roman ancestor. With only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the declension system of Latin and, as a result, have SVO sentence structure and make extensive use ofprepositions. The works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin have survived in whole or in part, in substantial works or in fragments to be analyzed in philology. They are in part the subject matter of the field of Classics. Their works were published in manuscript form before the invention of printing and now exist in carefully annotated printed editions such as the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press, or the Oxford Classical Texts, published by Oxford University Press. Latin translations of modern literature such as The Hobbit, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Paddington Bear, Winnie the Pooh, The Adventures of Tintin, Asterix, Harry Potter, Walter the Farting Dog, Le Petit Prince, Max

und Moritz, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Cat in the Hat, and a book of fairy tales, "fabulae mirabiles," are intended to garner popular interest in the language. Additional resources include phrasebooks and resources for rendering everyday phrases and concepts into Latin, such as Meissner's Latin Phrasebook.