1299: What is the Closest Descendant of Latin? Jul 1, 2018

It is difficult to assess what the most similar language today to Classical Latin; part of the difficulty is that Latin has been dead for over a millennia, and also because there are multiple possible criteria. In terms of the individual words, Sardinian is the most lexically similar language to Latin, however the pronunciation is very different. French and to a lesser extent Portuguese nasals are similar to Latin nasals, but otherwise the pronunciation is different, and it would sound more like Italian in some ways. In terms of the syntax, the language which is most similar may be Romanian or Romansh, which still retain some aspects of Latin declension.
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