romancelanguageinspired

Romance languages are a branch of the Italic language family within Indo-European, descended from Vulgar Latin spoken in the Roman Empire. They emerged as distinct languages during the early Middle Ages and spread worldwide through migration and colonization. The main languages in this group include Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Occitan, among others.

Historically they are divided into Western Romance (including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan, Galician, Occitan) and Eastern Romance (Romanian, Aromanian, Meglenitic), with Sardinian often treated separately for its conservatism. Some classifications also recognize a separate Aragonese, Ladin, Friulian, and Romansh groups.

Common features include a loss of Latin case systems, development of definite and indefinite articles, and a reliance on prepositions and word order to mark grammatical relations. Most Romance languages use the Latin-based alphabet, with diacritics; many languages preserve gender in nouns; verb systems typically express tense, aspect, mood, and negation with a combination of inflection and auxiliary verbs.

Today Romance languages are spoken across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia and the Pacific, with Spanish and Portuguese major in the Americas, French in many regions, Italian and Romanian in their home regions, and regional varieties often coexisting with official languages.

Standard varieties exist through national or regional academies and education systems, and the languages continue to evolve through loanwords, slang, and media influence.