Lingua Latina

Latin was originally the language of Latium (Lazio in Italian), the region of Italy which includes Rome. The speakers of Latin were surrounded by people who spoke other tongues—many related to theirs, but some completely unrelated. To the west, Osco-Umbrian languages were used, and to the north were speakers of Faliscan and Etruscan. Faliscan was very closely related to Latin, being in the same branch of the Italic subfamily. However, Etruscan was in no way related to Latin—in fact, it was not even in the Indo-European language family, to which even our English language belongs.

When the Roman Empire was established and grew, Latin became a wide-spread language. The other languages of Italy gave way to this new world tongue, and are now known only by a few documents and inscriptions left to us. However, Latin never really died, as did its neighbours in Italy such as Etruscan and Umbrian.
Latin was the language of the Romans, and then of the Roman Empire. Along with Greek, it was the lingua franca of the known world, and spread as far as Britain and what is now Turkey. Although not all people in the Empire gave up their languages in favour of that of the Romans, many learned the new language.

After many years, the Latin of the various regions of Europe changed and became so different as to be mutually unintelligible to the other dialects of Latin. These became the Romance languages of today, such as Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalán, and many others.

Thus, Latin lives on in many parts of Europe and North America in its descendents. However, it is evident that Latin did not remain in some parts of the Empire. The Germanic languages of Britain and Germany are still spoken today, and you won’t find many speakers of Latin languages in north Africa either.