Latin

About Latin

Latin was the language of ancient Rome and, for more than a thousand years after, the language of learning, law and the Church across Europe. Nobody speaks it as a first language today, but it is still taught in schools, used by the Catholic Church and is the official language of the Holy See. Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian all developed from spoken Latin, and a large share of English vocabulary comes from it.

There are two common ways to pronounce Latin. In Classical pronunciation, used in most schools, c is always hard like k and v sounds like w, so veni, vidi, vici sounds like "weni, widi, wiki". Church Latin sounds closer to Italian: c before e or i is like the ch in "church" and v is like English v. Latin has no words of its own for modern things such as phones or cars, so phrases for them are modern coinages.

FamilyIndo-European, Italic
Native speakersnone today
Official inthe Holy See
ScriptLatin alphabet
Codesla (ISO 639-1), lat (ISO 639-3)

Classification: Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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