Latin, a language spread by the Roman from Britain to Egypt, has had a lasting impact on languages all over the world. There aren’t many Romance languages in total, compared to the over 7000 languages in the world. The Romance languages include: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French,  and Portuguese among many other languages.

Old Latin

This was spoken from the time that Rome was still a kingdom to about the middle of the Roman Republic. It had originally used a right-to-left script, however it changed to a left-to-right script.

Classical Latin

Classical Latin began to develop as more people of the time wrote more and more. Poets, historian, and scholar wrote in this language. Further standardization of the language was established when grammar and literature school were established.

Vulgar Latin

Vulgar Latin was the language spoken by the commoners of the Roman Empire. This had no official script, thus historians have found it difficult to place together a language, however there is evidence in various graffiti and excerpts mentioned in literature. Different places may have had different variants of “Vulgar Latin” forming an early base for languages to develop.

Medieval Latin

Latin had begun to spread to other places that had never encountered languages, and mostly remained unchanged from its written form. It adopted new vocabulary from other languages as it interacted with more and more languages.

Renaissance Latin

The Renaissance renewed interest in Latin, however Latin had changed a lot since the days of Classical Latin. Scholars attempted to reform and relearn Latin as it had been. Most of the books written in that age were in Latin. The “Renaissance Humanists” were mostly the ones heading this.

New Latin

In relatively modern times, scientists began using a renewed form of Latin for words related to taxonomy or the International Scientific Vocabulary. Words from this “edition” of Latin have had some of the biggest influences on the English language.