Latin

Latin is an Italic language of the Indo-European family, first spoken by the Latins of Latium around the lower Tiber and carried across the Mediterranean by Rome. Its alphabet was borrowed from the Etruscans, and between about 75 BC and AD 200 Classical Latin took shape, while the Vulgar Latin of soldiers and settlers spread through the provinces.

Between the sixth and ninth centuries Vulgar Latin broke up into the Romance languages, yet written Latin lived on in the Church, law and scholarship. From around 1300 Renaissance humanists such as Petrarch revived classical models.

Neo-Latin carried Erasmus's satires, Thomas More's Utopia and, in 1687, Newton's Principia. Until the end of the seventeenth century most books and nearly all diplomatic documents were in Latin; afterwards vernaculars displaced it, though Ecclesiastical Latin remained the liturgical language of the Catholic Church.