The Romance-speaking world, circa 2020.
Romance languages are those that grew out of Latin – Spanish, French, Portuguese and so on. Costas Melas on YouTube has a wonderful video showing their history year by year in the form of a changing map. Here are some screen shots from that and a related video, one map every 500 years, with my own running commentary added, starting in 1000 BC:
-1000:
This map shows all the Indo-European languages of 1000 BC. Latin is not yet a language. But its ancestor, Proto-Italic (shown in red), is. It has broken away from Proto-Celtic (pink) and is spreading throughout Italy. Celtic languages will spread throughout France, Spain, Portugal, Britain and Ireland, where it will be easier for people to learn the closely related language of Latin. English will grow out of Proto-Germanic (blue). English is a distant cousin of Latin, but half its words will come from it, either directly or by way of French and other Romance languages.
-500:
Proto-Italic has become the languages of Latin, Faliscan, Umbrian, Oscan, Sicel and Venetic. Greek is spoken in southern Italy, Etruscan in the north-west. Latin is the language of Rome, not yet that of Italy.
+1:
The Roman Empire is nearing its height. Western Europe is becoming Romanized, most of its Celtic and Italic languages dying out. The solid colours show where Latin is the majority language, the stripes where it is commonly known, mainly as a second language, but not by the majority. Classical Latin is the Latin of the upper class. It is the kind you learn at school and see in books – both then and now. Vulgar Latin is what ordinary people speak. It will become French and Spanish and so on. In fact, the graffiti of Pompeii in 79 AD already shows Latin starting to turn into Italian.
+500:
Rome falls. Latin is still an administrative language in the eastern part of the empire. Latin never took firm root in Britain, already being invaded by Anglo-Saxons.
1000:
Latin is the language of learning in western Europe. It is what all the books are written in. But it is no longer understood by the masses, whose Vulgar Latin has now become Romance languages, like Old French and Old Spanish. Muslim and Slavic invasions have all but wiped out Romance languages in Africa, the Balkans and most of Iberia. Proto-Romanian is now cut off from the rest of the Latin world.
1500:
Latin reaches its height as a learned language. The Spanish Reconquista takes back Iberia. The map makes it look like a patchwork of Romance languages, but it is more of a continuum. If you walked from Madrid to Rome, you would barely notice any difference at all from one town to the next, yet when you got to Rome 2,000 km later, Spanish would have become Italian.
2000:
The printing press, nationalism and education turn the Romance languages into a few separate, distinct, uniform languages. They spread overseas – as a first language in the Americas, as a second language in much of Africa. Only half of the Romance world is White, only a third live in Europe. About half speak Spanish, one-fourth speak Portuguese.
– Abagond, 2021.
Source: Costas Melas on YouTube (8 minutes, 2019).
See also:
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Abagond 
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