French is a Western Romance Language.
Western Romance languages . There is also much higher morphological similarity between Spanish and Italian dialects than between Italian and French . Based on mutual intelligibility , Dalby counts a dozen languages : Portuguese , Spanish , Asturian-Leonese , Aragonese , Catalan , Gascon , Provençal , Gallo-Wallon , French , Franco-Provençal , Romansh , and Ladin . Today the four most-widely spoken standardized Western Romance languages are Spanish ( c. 410 million native ) , Portuguese ( c. 220 million native , another 45 million or so second-language speakers , mainly in Lusophone Africa ) , French ( c. 75 million native speakers , another 70 million or so second-language speakers , mostly in Francophone Africa ) , and Catalan ( c. 7.2 million native ) . Many of these languages have large numbers of non-native speakers ; this is especially the case for French , in widespread use throughout West Africa as a lingua franca .