There are 6,912 languages currently spoken in the world, according to the Ethnologue compendium. Of these, only eight came from Latin: Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Provencal and Romanian. Dalmatic, formerly spoken on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, also had a Latin origin, but has now become extinct. Latin itself is no longer spoken, and is now used only in official Vatican documents. In addition to spoken languages, Ethnologue considers three artificial languages (Esperanto, Europanto and Interlingua) and 121 sign languages.
It all started with a language spoken about 5,000 years ago in some region between India and Europe. There are no documents attesting to the Indo-European language, but the 449 current languages that derived from it have common characteristics, such as the roots of some words, the way words are modified to perform each syntactic function or even the order in which they need to be appear in sentences.
Mutations in the Indo-European tree resulted in Italic, Germanic, and nine subgroups. There are no written documents, but italic is believed to have been born around 1000 BC in the region, of course, of Italy.
Latium, one of the regions comprised by the Italic branch, on the banks of the Tiber River, is the birthplace of Latin, which emerged as the language of shepherds and farmers around 600 BC With the expansion of Rome, Latin expanded its area of activity and ended up absorbing the Oscan and Umbrian languages.
The starting point of the Romance languages was Vulgar Latin, spoken in everyday life. It was a language with practical and immediate purposes, unlike the classical Latin of writers such as Cicero and Virgil. In the regions that the Roman Empire conquered, Vulgar Latin gained new accents, such as Portuguese. (It also heavily influenced the Germanic languages, which are full of Latin words.)
In the Iberian peninsula, a Roman province since the end of the 3rd century BC, Latin began to change with the barbarian (5th century) and Arab (8th century) invasions. The Galician-Portuguese dialect emerged in the 12th century and, four centuries later, Galician and Portuguese already formed two different languages.