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Author: AgProv

Apr 10th 2013 at 9:25:56 AM

It depends. There appear to be quite wide differences between North America and Britain as to how the English-speaking world categorises the languages that grew up out of Latin. North America seemingly recognises only Spanish-speaking peoples as Latin, or Latin-American. (Where does Portuguese-speaking Brazil fit in this trope? British usage fits this nation into Latin America, and does not differentiate). Common usage in Britain takes in Italy as the linguistic group/ethnicity speaking the "purest" Latin language - after all, Rome is the source.Formal Linguistics describes Spanish,Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan, Occidan, Swiss/Romanz and Rumanian as being Latin languages, and by extent, their speakers as being Latin peoples. But popular usage would call Rumania a Balkan country, rather than a Latin one... and not too many people are aware of the Catalan-Occidan-Languedoc continuum, straddling south-eastern Spain and south-western France, as having languages which are distinct from Spanish and French and should be classed as linguistically related, but seperate from, the wider language groups around them. So how would the wider latin-language community fit in here?