Romance languages are the most widely spoken family of languages in the world from where three of the most widely practiced languages come from: Spanish, Portuguese and French. As a result of here, other less practiced but very widespread also arise such as Romanian, Italian or even Catalan itself.
These Romance languages are spoken by more than 700 million people around the world, as many are inherited from these Latin languages that developed from Latin in Western and Southern Europe around the 7th century.
This original Latin was evolving according to each territory creating its own languages throughout Europe of which we are heirs today. In each territory, specific conditions emerged that caused the original Latin to change, creating dialects throughout the continent. For this reason, in France a Romance language other than Spanish is spoken, for example.
Worldwide
Currently it is very difficult to establish how many Romance languages exist in the world or how many languages are inheritors of these Latin languages.
All the inherited languages of Latin known as Romance or Romance have similarities to each other, although later each one took its own way . For this reason, for a Spaniard, for example, it is much easier to study languages of Latin origin than to study languages of German or Slavic origin.
At present, although it is difficult to quantify how many Latin languages are alive right now, there are some 44 known to be practiced in parts of the world. The best known are Spanish with 330 million Spanish speakers spread over the five continents.
Our language is followed by Portuguese which, although it is spoken mostly in two countries, Portugal and Brazil, is practiced by some 200 million people.
Below these two great Latin languages would be French with approximately 76 million speakers, Italian with 64 million or Romanian with 25 million speakers worldwide.
As a result of these most widely practiced languages, it is then difficult to know how many millions of people practice other less known languages globally, such as Catalan or Galician, Sicilian, Neapolitan or Haitian Creole.
In addition, there are other Latin languages that have been preserved despite being in real danger of extinction because they are already reserved in small population centers that little by little stop practicing. This is the case of Asturleonian, Corsican, Romansh, Isturroan, which has about 1,000 speakers, or Gallurean.
