Romance

The Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin, the speech of Roman soldiers, settlers and traders, and form the only surviving Italic branch of Indo-European. Between 350 BC and 150 AD the Roman Empire carried Latin across Western Europe, the Balkans and North Africa; when imperial communications collapsed in the fifth century, dialects drifted apart under Germanic and Slavic influence.

By the early Middle Ages they had become distinct tongues, while Latin remained the written language of church and scholarship. The Council of Tours recognised the vernacular in 813, and the Oaths of Strasbourg of 842 survive as an early French text.

From the tenth century writers such as Dante Alighieri raised Tuscan and other vernaculars into literary languages. Printing later hardened favoured dialects into standards, and from the fifteenth century Spanish, Portuguese and French were carried overseas by colonial empires.