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The term "Romance" comes from the Romance word romance or romanz, from Latin romanice, the adverbial form of romanicus, in expressions like parabolare romanice ("to speak in Roman").
The modern Romance languages differ from Classical Latin in a number of fundamental respects:
The most spoken Romance language is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian.
Roughly, from west to east, the Romance variants, or dialects, form a dialect continuumA dialect continuum means a large geographical area, over which the spoken language differs only slightly between areas that are geographically close, but with mutual intelligibility steadily decreasing as the distances become greater. Dialects separated. Portuguese, French, and Romanian typify three extreme deviations, though this does not imply that they are totally distinct. Sardinian is the most isolated and conservative variant. Languedocian Occitan could be tagged as the central "Western Romance by default".
Historically, the first split was between SardinianSardinian Sardu is the main language spoken in the island of Sardinia, Italy, and it is considered the most conservative of all Romance languages. The particular history of the island, practically isolated from the Continent for thousands of years, and on and the rest. Then of the rest, the next split was between Romanian in the east, and the others in the west. The third major split was between ItalianItalian is a Romance language spoken by about 70 million people, most of whom live in Italy. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan dialects and is somewhat intermediate between the languages of Southern Italy and the Gallo-Romance languages of the North. and the Gallo-Iberian group. This latter then split into a Gallo-Romance group, which became the Oïl languages (including French), Occitan, Francoprovençal and Rumansh, and an Iberian Romance group which became Spanish and Portuguese. Catalan is considered by many specialists as a transition language between the Gallic group and the Iberian group, since it shares characteristics from both groups (just for an example, among many others: 'fear' is 'medo' in Portuguese, 'miedo' in Spanish, but 'por' in Catalan — compare with 'peur' in French).
There are many local varieties spoken in the Romance-language countries, and there is no clear differentiation between a 'language' and a 'dialect'. Roughly speaking, there are varieties that are considered national or international languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Catalan), and those which are more often considered regional languageA regional language is a language spoken in a part of a country it may be a small area, a federal state or province, or a wider area. Definition in international law For the purposes of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages: regional ors such as Occitan (or Provençal), Sardinian, the Oïl languages and Rumansh.
Classification frequently becomes questionable: is Galician, for example, a) a language in its own right; or b) a variety of Portuguese with strong influence of Spanish; or c) a language of which Portuguese is a dialect (as some argue it is)? Naturally, political and cultural and local pride issues play a role in these debates. Moreover, languages that lacked officialdom, a central standard model, or a literary tradition, such as Occitan, Sardinian or Rumansh, may possess several competing standards. And some minor variants which might have developed into distinct languages have been reduced to residual areas and restricted usage, like Astur-leonese or Aragonese.
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