| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
| Latin (Lingua Latina) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken | Vatican City |
| Region | Italic peninsula |
| Total speakers | extinct |
| Dialects | - |
| Genetic classification | Indo-European Italic |
| 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 are descended from Latin, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. It is said that 80% of scholarly English words are somehow derived from Latin. 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 FrenchFrench le francais la langue francaise is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered only by Spanish and Portuguese. French is the 11th most spoken language in the world, spoken by about 77 million people (called Francophones) as a mother to in the 18th century17th century 18th century 19th century more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701- 1800; however, historians will sometimes specifically refer to the 18th Century as 1715- 89, and English in the late 19thAlternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical ( 18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801- 1900. Events The Little Ice Age ended. Ecclesiastical LatinEcclesiastical Latin sometimes called "Church Latin", is the Latin language as used in documents of the Roman Catholic Church. The dogmatic definitions of the first seven General Councils were given in Greek, and even in Rome Greek was at first the langua remains the formal language of the Roman Catholic ChurchThe Roman Catholic Church (often called simply the Catholic Church, but see Catholicism for other meanings of the term "Catholic Church") is a worldwide body of Christians in full communion with the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, and subscribing to the beliefs to this day, which makes it the official national language of the Vatican. The Church continued to use Latin as its liturgical language until the 1960s. 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.