Latin language
Latin is an Italic language of the Indo-European family and was a major medium of communication in Europe and the Mediterranean during the ascendancy of the Roman Empire. After the Empire ended, use of the classical literary language declined, while the everyday version of the language, or Vulgar Latin, was undergoing the changes which would eventually form into Latin's successor languages: the Romance languages. In the western half of the former Empire, Latin persisted as the language of high culture and scholarship through the Renaissance, and to some extent even into the nineteenth century.
The influence of Latin can be widely detected in modern life. The Romance languages (among them Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan and Romansh) are descended from Latin, and the English language, having borrowed from these, especially from Norman French and Latin itself, similarly has a highly Latinate vocabulary. Knowledge of Latin roots can therefore provide the lay person with clues as to the meanings of terms in the Romance languages. Latin terminology is still used in the sciences, particularly in medicine, as well as in law. Until the middle of the 20th century, when the Second Vatican Council opened the door for the performance of the liturgy in the vernacular, Latin was the sole liturgical language of the Western rite (the vast majority) of the Roman Catholic Church.
Latin is a highly synthetic language, using many suffixes to indicate concerns such as formality as well as grammatical categories (i.e. number, gender, possession and tense). Adding these endings is called conjugating for verbs and declining for nouns and adjectives.