The major languages of the family include French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian, all national languages. Catalan also has taken on a political and cultural significance.
The Romance languages are a group of related languages all derived from Vulgar Latin within historical times and forming a subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The major languages of the family include French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian.
Although English has borrowed a lot of words from Latin, it is not a Romance language. Having developed from the mix between the dialects and vocabulary of Germanic peoples (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) who settled in Britain in the 5th century CE, English is considered a West Germanic language.
According to many sources, Italian is the closest language to Latin in terms of vocabulary. According to the Ethnologue, Lexical similarity is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 80% with Portuguese, 78% with Ladin, 77% with Romanian.
Portuguese is a Romance language descended from Latin. It is closely related to other Romance languages such as Spanish, French, and Italian. Portuguese is also one of the few languages with a significant presence in the Western and Eastern hemispheres.
The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
What is the Most Difficult Romance Language to Learn? Romanian is widely considered to be the trickiest of the Romance languages to learn, due to the challenge that mastering its grammar poses. French and Spanish are sometimes cited as being difficult, too.
English vocabulary comprises 29% French, 29% Latin, 26% Germanic, and 6% Greek.
Classical Latin, the language of Cicero and Virgil, became “dead” after its form became fixed, whereas Vulgar Latin, the language most Romans ordinarily used, continued to evolve as it spread across the western Roman Empire, gradually becoming the Romance languages.
French is often considered to be the most romantic language of them all. The French language has been associated with romance for centuries. In fact, it's often said that French is the language of love. This is because the French have a reputation for being incredibly romantic.
Close Language: French
That said, linguists have found that English and French are 27% lexical similar, and there are many words of French origin that English speakers use every day.
All Romance languages have evolved from Vulgar Latin. The oldest extant Romance language is Sardu . If you want to know what the Proto-Romance language was like, it was very much like Sardu - it is almost all 5th century Vulgar Latin.
1. Spanish. Spanish is the most spoken of the Romance languages, with around 75% of today's Spanish vocabulary coming from Latin. After Mandarin Chinese, Spanish is the second most spoken native language worldwide.
Romanian. Romanian is spoken by over 30 million people worldwide, making it the least prominent Romance language on this list. Romanian is also thought to be the Romance language which traveled the furthest from Vulgar Latin in terms of vocabulary.
Spanish has been rated the easiest thanks to its simple spelling, pronunciation and grammar. Plus, with 21 countries listing Spanish as their official language, it's also a very practical choice for travellers. Fun fact: Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world in terms of native speakers.
The Spanish language, a sort of older sibling to Portuguese, developed from Latin first. Portuguese then evolved from the Galician-Portuguese dialect of Spanish in the 1100's and became a separate tongue. Portuguese explorers and colonizers carried their language to other parts of the world beginning in the 1400's.
Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
1. English (1,452 million speakers) According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers. Like Latin or Greek at the time, English has become the world's common language.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
These scores suggest a ranking of linguistic distance from English among these languages: Japanese being the most distant, followed by Mandarin, then French and then Afrikaans, Norwegian and Swedish as the least distant.