| Origin | Vulgar Latin, the common speech of the Western Roman Empire |
| Descendants | Castilian • Catalan • French • Italian • Romanian • New Romance languages in the Middle East and North Africa |
| Notable features | More linguistic diversity than in our timeline due to the survival of Roman political structures and isolation of regional dialects |
The Romance languages are a group of related languages that originated from the spread of Vulgar Latin, the common speech of the Western Roman Empire. While Latin itself did not expand as extensively in this alternate timeline, its regional dialects evolved in isolation for centuries, producing a far more diverse array of daughter languages compared to our world.
In the centuries following the founding of Rome, Latin developed into the dominant language across much of the Western Roman Empire. However, the speech of common people, known as "Vulgar Latin," gradually diverged from the literary standard as the empire expanded.
Unlike in our timeline, the Western Roman Empire managed to survive the crisis of the 3rd century and continued as a political entity well into the Middle Ages. This meant the Vulgar Latin dialects of different regions -- from Iberia to Gaul to Italy -- had more time to evolve in isolation from one another.
As the Roman imperial authority waned in the West, the Vulgar Latin dialects of the Iberian peninsula began to solidify into distinct languages. The most prominent was Castilian, which emerged from the northern regions of the Iberian Kingdom. Castilian spread with the gradual reconquest of the peninsula from Moorish rule and the rise of the Spanish Empire.
Other major Iberian Romance languages include Catalan, spoken in the eastern Crown of Aragon, and Galician, a close relative of Portuguese that developed in the northwestern regions. All three languages benefited tremendously from the expansionist policies of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, becoming widely spoken across the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia.
While the Iberian languages dominated globally, other regional Vulgar Latin dialects also evolved into distinct languages, though with less widespread influence:
Due to their common Vulgar Latin roots, the Romance languages exhibit a high degree of lexical and structural similarity, with considerable mutual intelligibility between closely related varieties. A Castilian speaker, for instance, will generally be able to understand Catalan or Galician with minimal difficulty.
However, the more the languages diverged geographically and historically, the less mutually intelligible they became. A Spanish speaker may struggle to comprehend the nuances of distant Romance languages like Cypriot Maronite Arabic or Romanian. And the sheer diversity of the Romance language family in this timeline means there is no true "lingua franca" as in our world.
Overall, the survival of the Western Roman Empire and the subsequent isolation and evolution of its Vulgar Latin dialects created a remarkably diverse family of related languages, each with their own literary traditions, regional dialects, and global influences - a linguistic landscape quite different from the one we know.
