Latins

The term Latin has been used to describe several groups of people throughout history, first referring to the inhabitants of the ancient Latium region, then to Catholic Christians of the Latin rite, and most recently to Romance-speaking peoples.

Ancient Latins

The Latins were an ancient Italic people of the Latium region in central Italy, in the 1st millennium BC. Although they lived in independent city-states, they spoke Latin as a common language, held common religious beliefs, and extended common rights of residence and trade to one another. Collectively, these Latin states were known as the Latin League.
A rupture between Rome, one of the Latin states, and the rest of the Latin League emerged as a result of the former's territorial ambitions. The Latin League fought against Rome in the Latin War, which ended in a Roman victory. Consequently, some of the Latin states were incorporated within the Roman state, and their inhabitants were given full Roman citizenship. Others became Roman allies and enjoyed certain privileges. After the Social War, when the rest of the Latins received full Roman citizenship, "Latin" ceased to be an ethnolinguistic term and became a purely juridical category, ius latii.
The Roman Empire would go on to dominate the Mediterranean region for the next several centuries, spreading the Latin language and Roman culture. The Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire ended in AD 476, while the Greek-speaking eastern half survived on until 1453.

As a religious designation

Middle Ages

In the Eastern Roman Empire, and the broader Greek Orthodox world, Latins was a synonym for all people who followed the Roman Catholicism of Western Christianity, regardless of ethnicity. The term was related to the predominance of the Latin Church, which is the largest autonomous particular church within the broader Catholic Church, and took its name from its origins in the Latin-speaking world which had Rome as its center.
Latin was generally a negative characterization, especially after the 1054 schism. The term is still used by the Orthodox church communities, but only in a theological context. Nonetheless, it did not share this negative connotation in the West, where many self-identified with the term, such as Petrarch, when he states "Sumus enim non greci, non barbari, sed itali et latini.".

Present day

Latins are a constitutionally recognized minority in Cyprus. Hugh Foot, the last British governor of the island, revived the term in 1960 to distinguish them from the Maronite Cypriots, who are also Catholics. Other Catholics under the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem have also been referred to as Latins.

Latin peoples and regions

Europe and the Americas

In the present day, Latin can be an ethnically-related designation that denotes a member of the Latin peoples– including, and often specifically, Latin Americans.
The related term Latin Europe is sometimes used in reference to European countries and/or regions inhabited by Romance-speaking people. Within that framework, Latin peoples include Italians, French, Spaniards, Catalans, Provençals, Romansh, Portuguese, and Walloons in Western Europe, and Romanians in Eastern Europe. The Latin designation is also specifically present in the names of two Romance-speaking groups: the Ladin people of northern Italy and the Ladino people of Central America.
Historian Ioan-Aurel Pop describes the origin of Latin European ethnic groups as resulting from a "double assimilation process" that began with the territorial expansion of the ancient Romans. First, pre-Roman and indigenous peoples were Romanized, and later, Romanized populations incorporated "migratory elements" during late antiquity. While the use of Latin to denote a non-ethnolinguistic Western Catholic identity predominated in the medieval period, in 1368 Petrarch referenced a "Latin nation" that included the Italians and the French in a letter to Pope Urban V. In 1458, Pope Pius II used the term genus Italicum in his work De Europa to group together Italians and Romanians.
By the 19th century, Romance-speaking groups were being collectively classified as Latin peoples, a category that was considered one of the three major ethnolinguistic groupings of Europe, along with the Germanic and Slavic peoples. This period also gave rise to pan-Latinism, which advocates for the unification of, or solidarity among, Latin peoples. One variant of the ideology held the imperialist idea that Latin peoples should rule over non-Latins, while another variant instead favored a democratic Latin confederation. In 1927, The ''New York Times'' reported on "the incipient Pan-Latin movement" and defined "Latinity" as consisting of Latin populations from both Europe and the Americas, regardless of genetics.

Africa

Many of the present-day independent states of Africa have main official languages that are Romance, as a result of colonization by Romance-speaking European countries in the 19th century. The French political theorist Gabriel Hanotaux claimed that the Latin peoples were as capable of practicing modern imperialism as other groups and had an important role to play in the colonization of Africa.
Barthélémy Boganda, a politician of the Central African Republic, proposed a "United States of Latin Africa" in 1957 that would serve as a federation of the Romance-speaking countries in the region of Central Africa; this never came to fruition. African-American author Richard Wright, who criticized the proposal, said that "Latin Africa" correlated with "Catholic Africa" and would create an unnecessary religious division against the English-speaking "Protestant Africa".