Latin

Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. more...

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Latin gained wide currency as the formal language of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, and was also later adopted by medieval scholars, as well as the Catholic Church. An inflectional and synthetic language, Latin relies little on word order, conveying meaning through a system of affixes attached to word stems. The Latin alphabet, derived from that of the Etruscans and Greeks, remains the most widely used alphabet in the world.

Although Latin is now widely considered to be an extinct language, with very few fluent speakers and no native ones, it has exerted a major influence on many other languages that are still thriving and continues to see significant use in science, academia, and law. Romance languages are descended from Vulgar Latin, and many words adapted from Latin are found in other modern languages—including English, where roughly six out of every ten commonly-used words are derived, directly or indirectly, from Latin. This is part of its legacy as the lingua franca of the Western world for over a thousand years. Latin was only replaced in this capacity by French in the 18th century, though Latin continued to be used in some intellectual and political circles.

The Roman Catholic Church used Latin as its primary liturgical language until the advent of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, after which the various vernacular languages of its members were allowed in the liturgy. However, Ecclesiastical Latin remains the official language of Vatican City. Until recently, it was common to find Classical Latin, the literary language of the late Republic and early Empire, taught in many primary, grammar, and secondary schools throughout the world, often combined with Greek as the study of Classics.

History

Latin is a member of the family of Italic languages, and its alphabet, the Latin alphabet, is based on the Old Italic alphabet, which is in turn derived from the Greek alphabet. Latin was first brought to the Italian peninsula in the 9th or 8th century BC by migrants from the north, who settled in the Latium region, specifically around the River Tiber, where the Roman civilization first developed. Latin was influenced by the Celtic dialects and the non-Indo-European Etruscan language of northern Italy, as well as by the Greek of southern Italy.

Although surviving Roman literature consists almost entirely of Classical Latin, an artificial and highly stylized literary language whose Golden Age stretched from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD (encompassing the greatest Roman prose writers and poets like Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Livy, and Caesar, among others), the actual spoken language of the Western Roman Empire was Vulgar Latin, which significantly differed from Classical Latin in grammar, vocabulary, and (eventually) pronunciation.

Read more at Wikipedia.org