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French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that specifically is classified under the Gallo-Romance languages.. The discussion of the history of a language is typically divided into "external history", describing the ethnic, political, social, technological, and other changes that affected the languages, and "internal history", describing the ...
The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries.
Today, a single Gallo-Romance language (French) dominates much of the geographic region (including the formerly-non-Romance areas of France) and has also spread overseas. At its broadest, the area also encompasses Southern France; Catalonia, the Valencian Community, and the Balearic islands in eastern Spain; Andorra; and much of Northern Italy.
In diplomacy, French is one of the six official languages of the United Nations (and one of the UN Secretariat's only two working languages [106]), one of twenty official and three procedural languages of the European Union, an official language of NATO, the International Olympic Committee, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Economic ...
Languages in this group are said to be more conservative, i.e. they retained more features of the original Latin. The West group split into a Gallo-Romance group, which became the Oïl languages (including French), Gallo-Italian, Occitan, Franco-Provençal and Romansh, and an Iberian Romance group which became Spanish and Portuguese.
Gallo is a language of oral tradition, whose history is rich with stories, fables, and legends. Gallese legends frequently address recurring characters, such as Gargantua and Morgan le Fay, or questions of how the countryside was created. In the 19th century, oral literature was collected by researchers and folklorists such as Paul Sébillot ...
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A color-coded map of most languages used throughout Europe. There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most belong to the Indo-European language family. [1] [2] Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language.