Claim: French is a Western Romance Language.

Western Romance languages are one of the two subdivisions of a proposed subdivision of the Romance languages based on the La Spezia -- Rimini line . They include the Gallo-Romance and Iberian-Romance branches as well as northern Italian . The subdivision is based solely on the use of the `` s '' for pluralization and the weakening of some consonants , but that makes the categorization highly problematic because there is much higher lexical similarity between all dialects of Italian and French than between French and Spanish . There is also much higher morphological similarity between Spanish and Italian dialects than between Italian and French .   Based on mutual intelligibility , Dalby counts a dozen languages : Portuguese , Spanish , Asturian-Leonese , Aragonese , Catalan , Gascon , Provençal , Gallo-Wallon , French , Franco-Provençal , Romansh , and Ladin . This classification criterion is however problematic , due to the much higher levels of mutual intelligibility between Italic and Iberian languages than between either of these with Gallo-Romance languages .   Some classifications include Italo-Dalmatian ; the resulting clade is generally called Italo-Western Romance . Other classifications place Italo-Dalmatian with Eastern Romance .   Sardinian does not fit into either Western or Eastern Romance , and may have split off before either .   Today the four most-widely spoken standardized Western Romance languages are Spanish -LRB- c. 410 million native -RRB- , Portuguese -LRB- c. 220 million native , another 45 million or so second-language speakers , mainly in Lusophone Africa -RRB- , French -LRB- c. 75 million native speakers , another 70 million or so second-language speakers , mostly in Francophone Africa -RRB- , and Catalan -LRB- c. 7.2 million native -RRB- . Many of these languages have large numbers of non-native speakers ; this is especially the case for French , in widespread use throughout West Africa as a lingua franca .