The Romance languages, including Spanish and Italian, evolved primarily from Latin, especially the spoken varieties known as Vulgar Latin.
Latin spread across much of Europe as the Roman Empire expanded from the third century BCE onward. Soldiers, merchants, administrators, and settlers used everyday forms of Latin alongside more formal Classical Latin. After the Western Roman Empire fragmented, regional speech varieties became increasingly isolated and developed in different directions.
Those changes produced languages such as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, and Catalan. Their vocabulary and grammar still reveal their Latin ancestry, although each language also absorbed influences from pre-Roman, Germanic, Slavic, Arabic, and other languages.
“Vulgar” Latin does not mean vulgar in the modern sense; it comes from Latin vulgus, meaning “the common people.” Classical Latin remained important in writing, religion, scholarship, and administration long after spoken Latin had diversified into the Romance family.