Latin Lesson 1-2

Please take them before taking this class

Aragonese, Aromanian, Asturian, Arpitan, Catalan, Corsican, Emilian, Extremaduran, Fala, French, Cajun French, Friulian, Galician, Istriot, Italian, Jèrriais, Judeo-Italian, Ladin, Ladino, Ligurian, Lombard, Minderico, Mirandese, Napoletano-Calabrese, Occitan, Picard, Piedmontese, Portuguese, Romagnol, Romanian, Istro Romanian, Megleno Romanian, Romansh, Campidanese Sardinian, Gallurese Sardinian, Logudorese Sardinian, Sassarese Sardinian, Shuadit, Sicilian, Spanish, Charapa Spanish, Venetian, Walloon and Zarphatic. And those are just the languages that are still around today.

Deciding what’s a “language” and what’s a “dialect” is a tricky business, because languages really exist on a spectrum, rather than in separate boxes. Therefore, there isn’t full agreement as to exactly how many Romance languages there are. Ethnologue breaks the Romance languages down into 44 different languages.

The most spoken Romance languages are Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian, which combined are spoken by over 90 percent of those who speak a Romance language.

Getting an exact count of how many people speak a Romance language is a tad difficult. If you tally together the population of every Romance language, you get 1.2 billion speakers in the world. This doesn’t take into account that there’s overlap in these populations, however. There are many, many multilingual people in Europe, so this inflates the numbers a bit.

If you only count the top five languages by user, however, the number is still over 1.1 billion, so it’s a pretty safe bet that about one-seventh of the population alive today speaks a Romance language.

Please continue to learn about latin in th next class!!!