Latin



Alternative meanings: See Latin (disambiguation)
Latin (latina)
Spoken Roman Empire
Region Italic peninsula
Total speakers extinct
Dialects -
Genetic
classification 		Indo-European
 Italic
  Latin
Official status
Official language Vatican City
Regulated by none
Language codes
ISO 639-1 la
ISO 639-2 lat
SIL LTN
Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire.
All Romance languages descend from Latin, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. Moreover, in the Western world, Latin was a lingua franca, the learned language for scientific and political affairs, for more than a thousand years, being eventually replaced by French in the 18th century and English in the late 19th. It remains the formal language of the Roman Catholic Church to this day, which includes being the official national language of the Vatican. It is also still used, along with Greek, to furnish the names used in the scientific classification of living things. The closest living common language to Latin is Italian.