Romance languages , a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The Romance languages have more than 600 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, as well as in many smaller regions scattered through the world.

All Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic) descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of soldiers, settlers and slaves of the Roman Empire, which was substantially different from the Classical Latin of the Roman literati. Between 200 BC and 100 AD, the expansion of the Empire, coupled with administrative and educational policies of Rome, made Vulgar Latin the dominant native language over a wide area spanning from the Iberian Peninsula to the western coast of the Black Sea. During the Empire's decline and after its collapse and fragmentation in the fifth century, Vulgar Latin began to evolve independently within each local area, and eventually diverged into dozens of distinct languages. The oversea empires established by Spain, Portugal and France after the fifteenth century then spread Romance to the other continents - to such an extent that about two-thirds of all Romance speakers are now found outside Europe.