Latin

Latin is a member of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European language family that includes other Romance languages. Italic speakers were not native to Italy. They migrated to the Italian Peninsula in the 2nd millennium BC. Before their arrival, Italy was populated by Etruscans, a non-Indo-European-speaking people, in the north, and by Greeks in the south. Latin developed in west-central Italy in an area along the River Tiber known as Latium which became the birthplace of the Roman civilisation.

As Rome extended its political dominion over the whole of the Italian Peninsula, Latin become dominant over the other Italic languages, which ceased to be spoken sometime in the 1st century AD. The expansion of the Roman Empire also spread Latin throughout the territories occupied by the Romans who spoke Vulgar Latin, a colloquial variety of the language actually spoken by Roman citizens. Vulgar Latin was a language of wider communication but it was not a standardised written language. It was Classical Latin, a stylised and standardised variety of the language, that was used for all written communication. Vulgar Latin varied across the territories occupied by the Romans depending on a variety of factors, including the influence of local languages. As the Roman Empire disintegrated and communication with Rome declined, local forms of Vulgar Latin diverged more and more from the Classical norms in structure, vocabulary, and pronunciation. They became less and less mutually intelligible, and by the 9th century developed into separate Romance languages, as we know them today.

As Vulgar Latin continued to evolve, Classical Latin continued in a more or less standardised form throughout the Middle Ages as the written language of religion and scholarship. As such, it had a profound effect on all Western European languages.

Even though Latin is no longer spoken today, as the lingua franca of the Western world for over a thousand years, it has exerted a major influence on many living languages. Most modern Western Indo-European languages, have directly or indirectly borrowed words from Latin, and it still has limited use in academia, medicine, science, and law. The study of Classical Latin language and literature, including the works of Roman writers and poets, such as Ovid and Virgil, is part of the curriculum in schools and universities of many countries.

The Catholic Church used Latin as its primary liturgical language until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) after which it was largely replaced by the local spoken languages of the parishioners. However, Ecclesiastical Latin, also known as Church Latin, remains the official language of Vatican City, and is used in documents of the Roman Catholic Church and in its Latin liturgies. Ecclesiastical Latin does not differ greatly from Classical Latin.

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