The Romance languages (also sometimes called Romanic languages) are a language family in the Indo-European languages. They started from Vulgar Latin (in Latin, “vulgar” is the word for “common” and so “Vulgar Latin” means “Common Latin”). The most spoken Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian.
They are called “Romance languages” because they originate from Latin, the language spoken by the Western Roman Empire. The area that the Romance languages are spoken in Europe is mostly the extent of the Western Roman Empire.
Latin first spread across Europe with the growth of the Roman Empire, but when the empire collapsed, different regional dialects began to evolve into their own languages. Although English is a Germanic language in its origins, at least half the vocabulary of modern English derives from Romance languages.
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