Latin

Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome.

Latin gained wide currency as the formal language of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, and was also later adopted by medieval scholars, as well as the Catholic Church. An inflectional and synthetic language, Latin relies little on word order, conveying syntax through a system of affixes attached to word stems. The Latin alphabet, derived from that of the Etruscans and Greeks, remains the most widely used alphabet in the world.

Although Latin is now widely considered to be a dead language, with very few fluent speakers and no native ones, it has exerted a major influence on many other languages that are still thriving and continues to see significant use in science, academia, and law. Romance languages are descended from Vulgar Latin, and many words adapted from Latin are found in other modern languages—including English, where roughly sixty percent of words are derived, directly or indirectly, from Latin. This is part of its legacy as the lingua franca of the Western world for over a thousand years. Latin was only replaced in this capacity by English in the 20th century, though Latin continued to be used in some intellectual and political circles.

The Roman Rite of the Roman Catholic Church has Latin as its official language, and had it as its primary liturgical language until just after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, when the various vernacular languages of its members were allowed in the liturgy. Latin remains the official language of Vatican City. Until recently, it was common to find Classical Latin, the literary language of the late Republic and early Empire, taught in many primary, grammar, and secondary schools throughout the world, often combined with Greek as the study of Classics.