Latin is the ancient language that gave rise to the Romance languages. More precisely, modern Romance languages descend mainly from Vulgar Latin, the everyday spoken varieties used across the Roman world, rather than directly from the formal Classical Latin favored in literature and government.
As Rome expanded from roughly the 3rd century BCE onward, Latin spread through Italy, Gaul, Hispania, parts of the Balkans, and North Africa. Local populations adapted it alongside their own languages, creating regional speech patterns. After the Western Roman Empire fragmented in the fifth century, those varieties became increasingly separated and changed independently.
Over centuries, these developments produced languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan. They share much vocabulary and grammar because of their Latin ancestry, although Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and other languages also influenced them. Latin itself continued as a major written and scholarly language long after spoken forms had evolved into Romance languages.