According to many sources, Italian is the closest language to Latin in terms of vocabulary. According to the Ethnologue, Lexical similarity is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 80% with Portuguese, 78% with Ladin, 77% with Romanian.

The Italian language stems directly from Latin, just like other Romance languages like Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French, Romanian, and other minority languages (Occitan, Provençal, Galician, Ladin and Friulan).

The most widely spoken of these languages are Spanish (489 million), Portuguese (250 million), French (77 million), Italian (67 million), and Romanian (24 million). Regional Romance languages also exist, including Catalan, Occitan and Sardinian.

The early 16th century saw the dialect used by Dante in his work replace Latin as the language of culture. We can thus say that modern Italian descends from 14th-century literary Florentine.

Italian is the closest national language to Latin, followed by Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, and the most divergent being French.

Italian, a Romance language, is closely related to all of the other languages in the same family, like Spanish, French, and Portuguese, to name a few. For this reason, Italian is often considered one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn.

Italian ( italiano, [itaˈljaːno] ( listen) or lingua italiana, [ˈliŋɡwa itaˈljaːna]) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. Italian is, by most measures and together with Sardinian, the closest language to Latin, from which it descends via Vulgar Latin.

This doesn’t mean that the words are exactly the same between the two languages, but that they have similar roots and that they are linguistically related. To compare, Italian has 89% of its vocabulary in common with French and Spanish has 89% in common with Portuguese. But these are all languages in the Romance language family.

The Italic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European language family, originally spoken by Italic peoples. They include Latin and its descendants (the Romance languages) as well as a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, South Picene, and possibly Venetic and Sicel.

The largest language in southern Italy, except Ionic Greek spoken in the Greek colonies, was Messapian, known due to some 260 inscriptions dating from the 6th and 5th centuries BC.