The Romance languages sometimes called the Latin languages, and occasionally

the Romanic or Neo-Latin languagesare the modern languages that evolved

from spoken Latin between the sixth and ninth centuries A.D. and that thus form a
branch of the Italic languages within the Indo-European language family.
The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers
are Spanish (410 million), Portuguese (216 million), French(75 million), Italian (60
million), and Romanian (25 million). Romance languages are the continuation of Vulgar
Latin, the popular and colloquial sociolect of Latin spoken by soldiers, settlers,
and merchants of the Roman Empire, as distinguished from the classical form of the
language spoken by theRoman upper classes, the form in which the language was
generally written. Between 350 BC and AD 150, the expansion of the Empire, together
with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native
language in continental Western Europe. Latin also exerted a strong influence
in southeastern Britain, the Roman province of Africa, the Roman province of Asia and
the Balkans north of the Jireek Line. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three
distinct genders, seven noun cases, four verb conjugations, six tenses, threepersons,
three moods, two voices, two aspects, and twonumbers. Latin is the official language in
Military order of Malta and Vatican city. Throughout European history, an education in
the Classics was considered crucial for those who wished to join literate
circles. Instruction in Latin is an essential aspect of Classics. In today's world, a large
number of Latin students in America learn fromWheelock's Latin: The Classic
Introductory Latin Course, Based on Ancient Authors. Latin was the official language of
Croatian Parliament (Sabor) from the 13th until the 19th century (1847). officially
recognized and widely used[12][13][14][15] between the 9th and 18th centuries, commonly
used in foreign relations and popular as a second language among some of the nobility.

The Indo-Iranian languages or Indo-Iranic languages[2][3] and sometimes in older

literature known as the Aryan languages,[4]constitute the largest and easternmost
extant branch of the Indo-European language family. It has more than 1 billion
speakers, stretching from the Caucasus (Ossetian) and Europe (Romani) eastward
to Xinjiang (Sarikoli) and Assam (Assamese), and south to theMaldives (Maldivian). The
common ancestor of all of the languages in this family is called Proto-Indo-Iranian also known as Common Aryan. The three branches of modern Indo-Iranian languages
are Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and Nuristani. Additionally, sometimes a fourth independent
branch, Dardic, is posited, but recent scholarship in general places Dardic languages as
archaic members of the Indo-Aryan branch. The Indo-Iranian languages derive from a
reconstructed common proto-language, called Proto-Indo-Iranian.
Indo-Iranian languages were once spoken across an even wider area.
The Scythians were described by Greek writerStrabo as inhabiting the lands to the
north of the Black Sea in present-day Ukraine, Russia, Moldova and Romania. The rivernames Don, Dnieper, Danube etc. are possibly of Indo-Iranian origin. The so-

called Migration Period saw Indo-Iranian languages disappear from Eastern Europe,
apart from the ancestor of Ossetian in the Caucasus, with the arrival of theTurkicspeaking Pechenegs and others by the 8th century AD.
The oldest attested Indo-Iranian languages are Vedic Sanskrit (ancient Indo-Aryan),
Older and Younger Avestan and Old Persian (ancient Iranian languages). A few words
from another Indo-Aryan language (see Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni) are attested
in documents from the ancient Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia and Syria
and the Hittitekingdom in Anatolia.
Most of the largest languages (in terms of native speakers) are a part of the Indo-Aryan
group: Hindustani (HindiUrdu, ~590 million[6]), Bengali (205 million[7]), Punjabi (100
million), Marathi (75 million), Gujarati (50 million), Bhojpuri (40 million),Awadhi (40
million), Maithili (35 million), Odia (35 million), Marwari (30 million), Sindhi (25
million), Rajasthani (20 million),Chhattisgarhi (18 million), Assamese (15
million), Sinhalese (16 million), Nepali (17 million), and Rangpuri (15 million). Among
the Iranian branch, major languages are Persian (60 million), Pashto (ca. 50
million), Kurdish (35 million),[8] andBalochi (8 million). Numerous smaller languages
exist.