Today's language lesson

The most widely spoken Romance language today is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, all of which are main and official national languages in more than one country. A few other languages have official status on a regional or otherwise limited level, for instance Friulian, Sardinian and Valdôtain in Italy; Romansh in Switzerland; Galician, Occitan Aranese and Catalan in Spain (the latter of which is also the only official language in the small sovereign state of Andorra). Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian are also official languages of the European Union. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan are the official languages of the Latin Union; French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Outside Europe, French, Spanish and Portuguese are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that made up their respective colonial empires. Spanish and French are spoken on all continents. Spanish is mostly spoken in South America and in isolated regions of Africa, Asia (Philippines, unofficial since 1973) and Oceania, Easter Island (Chile). Portuguese is spread over South America, Western and Southern Africa and some regions of Eastern Asia. Although Italy also had some colonial possessions, the language didn't remain official after the end of the colonial domination, resulting in Italian being spoken only as a minority or secondary language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia or African countries like Libya, Eritrea and Somalia. Romania didn't establish a colonial empire, but the language spread outside of Europe due to emigration, notably in Western Asia; Romanian flourished in Israel, where it is spoken by some 5% of the total population as mother tongue,^[2] and by many more as a secondary language, considering the large population of Romanian-born Jews that moved to Israel after WW2.^[3]

Romance speakers by languages

The total native speakers of Romance languages is divided as follows (with their ranking within the languages of the world in brackets):

• Spanish 47% (5th)
• Portuguese 26% (7th)
• French 11% (11th)
• Italian 9% (18th)
• Romanian 4% (34th)
• Catalan 1% (n/a)
• others 2%

Source: MSN Encarta - Languages Spoken by More Than 10 Million People (number of Romance speakers estimated at 690 million speakers, number of Catalan language speakers estimated at 8 million)

The remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact. National governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well a potential source of separatist movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it—by extensively promoting the use of the official language, by restricting the use of the "other" languages in the media, by characterizing them as mere "dialects"—or worse.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, increased sensitivity to the rights of minorities have allowed some of these languages to recover some of their prestige and lost rights. Yet, it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the minority languages' decline.