page_title: Romance languages
section_title: Demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Romance languages / Demographics
caption_attribution_description: Proportion of Romance languages in the total number of Romance speakers
context_page_description: The Romance languages are a language family in the Indo-European languages. They started from Vulgar 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. Their grammatical inflection system has been simplified and lost most of the complex case structure of classical Latin.
  The area that the Romance languages are spoken in Europe is mostly the extent of the Western Roman Empire. The Greek language superseded Latin in the Eastern Roman Empire. Latin survived in Romania, whose language, Romanian, is a Romance language. In Moldova it is sometimes called Moldovan.
context_section_description: The Romance language family is one of the biggest in the world, and in total, there are almost a billion first and second language speakers. 
  Spanish is the most widely used Romance language, follow[Portuguese]] and then French.
  Spanish is spoken mainly in Spain and Latin America. Portuguese is mostly used/spoken in Brazil, Portugal and parts of Africa. French is spoken in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, and in some areas of Africa. Romanian is spoken in Romania and Moldova.
caption: Percentage of speakers of each Romance language, out of the total speakers of all the Romance languages
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