Classification
Linguistically speaking, the Italian language is a member of the Italo-Dalmatian group of languages, which is part of the Italo-Western grouping of the Romance languages, which are a subgroup of the Italic branch of Indo-European.
Italian, like the other Romance languages, is the direct offspring of the Latin spoken by the Romans and imposed by them on the peoples under their dominion. Thereby, Italian retains the closest resemblance to Latin, although there are other langauges spoken in Italy which are even closer to Latin, for example Sardo logudorese language.