Latin is an ancient Indo-European language. It was originally spoken only in the region immediately surrounding Rome, called Latium. It gained wide currency as the formal language of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, as well as, later, of medieval scholars and the Catholic Church militant. An inflectional and synthetic language, Latin relies little on word order, conveying meaning through a system of affixes attached to word stems. The Latin alphabet, derived from that of the Etruscans, remains the most widely-used alphabet in the world.

Although now widely considered to be an extinct language, with very few fluent speakers and almost no native ones (though Ecclesiastical Latin remains the official, 'national' language of Vatican City), Latin has exerted a major influence on many other languages that are still thriving, and continues to see limited use in academia, medicine, scientific classification and law. Six out of every ten commonly-used English words are derived, directly or indirectly, from Latin. All of the so-called Romance languages are descended from Vulgar Latin, and many words adapted from Latin are found in other modern languages -- all part of its legacy as the lingua franca of the Western world for over a thousand years (it was only replaced in this capacity by French during the 18th century, and even then continued to be used in certain intellectual and political circles).

The Catholic Church used Latin as its primary liturgical language until the advent of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, after which it was largely replaced by the various vernacular languages of the parishioners. Before that time, it was common to find Latin taught in many primary, grammar and secondary schools throughout the world -- there are still quite a few people who remember when Latin was a living language.