Romance Languages

Romance languages are a branch of the Italic languages, which itself are a branch of the Indo-European languages. That basically means that they are related to other branches of the Indo-European languages, e.g. the Germanic languages. However, only a few words are still very similar. The major Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian and Catalan. All Romance languages come from Latin. That's why they are so similar to each other.

The most spoken Romance language is Spanish. It's spoken almost on every continent of the world. Spain colonized many countries of the Americas, Africa and Asia, and brought their language with them. Now Spanish is either the official language or an important lingua franca.

Subgroups

The Romance languages are divided into many subgroups. Since the Latin-speaking Roman Empire controlled vast areas in Europe, it also spread its language. As the time passed, Vulgar Latin evolved into many different languages. The Romance languages also got influenced by other languages, mostly non-Romance. For example, French got strongly influenced by the Germanic languages, while Romanian got influenced by the Slavic languages. Because of these different influences you can divide the Romance languages into subgroups. The languages of each subgroup is more related to the languages of the same subgroups than to the other Romance languages.

History

After the Roman Empire fell, Vulgar (spoken) Latin began changing at a higher rate. Through different migrations and influences, the languages got more and more distinct. French was mainly influenced by the Germanic people who invaded the Western Roman Empire, Spanish by the Arabic people who controlled Iberia for centuries and Romanian by the Slavic migration. However there are still languages which were barely influenced by non-Romance languages. The best example is Italian.

French is a good example of a Romance language, that was heavily influenced by other, non-Romance languages. When the Franks invaded the contemporary France, they influenced the Vulgar Latin spoken there. The most visible influences are the pronunciation of words and also the vocabulary.