What is a Roman language?
“Roman language” is a term for a language that uses the Roman alphabet. The Roman alphabet, also called the Latin alphabet, is essentially the alphabet familiar to English speakers. The Roman alphabet derives 21 of its characters from Etruscan. The Romans added two more to make 23, and the modern English alphabet has added J, U and W to make 26. Other languages add diacritical marks to the characters, or combine some characters (ligatures). English, French, Spanish, and most European languages are written using the Roman alphabet, as are Tagalog, Hmong and Vietnamese. Major language groups that do not use the Roman alphabet include Semitic languages (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew), Cyrillic languages (e.g. Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian), Asian languages (e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Thai) and Indian languages (e.g. Hindi, Urdu). Note that a Roman language is not the same as a Romance language, which is, loosely speaking, a language derived from Latin. Spanish and Italian are both Roman and Romance la
