The Romance languages (also called Romanic languages or Neo-Latin languages) are the modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the third and eighth centuries and that form a subgroup of the Italic languages within the Indo-European language family.
Today, around 800 million people are native speakers worldwide, mainly in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, but also elsewhere. Additionally, the major Romance languages have many non-native speakers and are in widespread use as lingua francas. This is especially the case for French, which is in widespread use throughout Central and West Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Maghreb.
The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish (470 million), Portuguese (250 million), French (150 million), Italian (90 million), and Romanian (25 million).Because of the difficulty of imposing boundaries on a continuum, various counts of the modern Romance languages are given; for example, Dalby lists 23 based on mutual intelligibility. The following, more extensive list, includes 35 current, living languages, and one recently extinct language, Dalmatian:
Ibero-Romance: Portuguese, Galician, Mirandese, Asturian, Leonese, Spanish (Castilian), Aragonese, Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish);
Occitano-Romance: Catalan/Valencian, Occitan (langue d'oc), Gascon;
Gallo-Romance: French/Oïl languages, Franco-Provençal (Arpitan);
Rhaeto-Romance: Romansh, Ladin, Friulian;
Gallo-Italic: Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Emilian-Romagnol;
Italo-Dalmatian: Italian, Tuscan and Corsican, Sassarese, Sicilian, Neapolitan, Dalmatian (extinct in 1898), Venetian, Istriot;
Sardinian;
Eastern Romance: Daco-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian.
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