Romance languages Facts for Kids

Quick facts for kids Romance
Geographic distribution:	Originally Southern Europe and parts of Northern Africa; now also most of America. Official languages of half the countries in Africa and parts of Oceania.
Linguistic classification:	Indo-European Italic Romance
Proto-language:	Vulgar Latin
Subdivisions:	Western Romance (or Italo-Western) Eastern Romance Sardinian
Countries where Romance languages are official (dark orange) or national/secondary (light orange)
Romance languages in the world: Blue – French Green – Spanish Orange – Portuguese Yellow – Italian Red – Romanian Lighter colors mean that the language is not official, but important

The Romance languages are a group of languages that come from Latin. They are part of the larger Indo-European language family. These languages started from a type of Latin called Vulgar Latin. "Vulgar" here means "common," so it was the everyday Latin spoken by regular people, not the formal Latin used in books.

The name "Romance" comes from the word "Roman," because these languages grew out of the language spoken by the ancient Romans. The main Romance languages you might know are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Catalan is also a big one.

The areas in Europe where Romance languages are spoken today mostly match where the Western Roman Empire used to be. In the Eastern Roman Empire, Greek became more common than Latin. But Latin did survive in places like Romania, and that's why Romanian is a Romance language.

How Many People Speak Romance Languages?
Main Romance Languages
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See also

How Many People Speak Romance Languages?

This chart shows the percentage of people who speak each Romance language, out of all Romance language speakers.

The Romance language family is one of the largest in the world. Almost a billion people speak a Romance language as their first or second language. That's a lot of people!

Spanish is the most widely spoken Romance language. After Spanish, Portuguese has the next highest number of speakers, followed by French.

Spanish is mainly spoken in Spain and many countries in Latin America. Portuguese is mostly spoken in Brazil, Portugal, and some parts of Africa. French is spoken in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, and several countries in Africa. Romanian is spoken in Romania and the Republic of Moldova.