Latin American (4170)

Latin America (Portuguese and Spanish: América Latina; French: Amérique Latine) is the region of the Americas where Romance languages, those derived from Latin (particularly Spanish and Portuguese), are primarily spoken. more...

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Latin America is contrasted with the less frequently-used term Anglo-America, designating that region of the Americas where English predominates.

Definition

There are several definitions of Latin America, none of them perfect or necessarily logically consistent:

In most common contemporary usage, Latin America refers only to those territories in the Americas where Spanish or Portuguese prevail: Mexico, most of Central and South America, plus Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean.; Strictly speaking, Latin America can designate all of those countries and territories in the Americas where a Romance language (i.e. languages derived from Latin, and hence the name of the region) are spoken: Spanish, Portuguese, French, and creole languages based upon these. Indeed, this was the original intent when the term was coined, by a Frenchman. Using this definition, Latin America includes not only all Spanish- and Portuguese- speaking countries, but also the current and former French territories in the hemisphere, including Quebec in Canada, Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, and French Guiana in South America.; The former Dutch colony Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, and Aruba are not usually considered part of Latin America, although in the latter two, a predominantly Iberian-derivated creole language, Papiamento, is spoken by the majority of the population.; Sometimes, particularly in the United States, the term Latin America may be used to refer to all of the Americas to the south of that country, including such countries as Belize, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana Antigua and Barbuda and the Bahamas, where English - a non-Romance language - prevails.; In historical terms, Latin America could be defined as all those parts of the Americas that were once part of the Spanish, Portuguese and French Empires. Under this definition, much of the U.S. Southwest, as well as Florida and French Louisiana, would be also included in the region.;

The distinction between Latin America and Anglo America, and more generally the stress on European heritage, overlooks the fact that there are many places in the Americas (e.g. highland Peru or Guatemala) where American Indian cultures and languages are important, as well as areas in which the influence of African cultures is strong (e.g. the Caribbean, including parts of Colombia and Venezuela, and coastal Brazil).

Etymology

Originally a political term, Amérique latine is considered by some to have been coined by French emperor Napoleon III, who cited Amérique latine and Indochine as goals for expansion during his reign. While the term was intended to help him stake a claim to those territories, it eventually came to embody those parts of the Americas that speak Romance languages initially brought by settlers from Spain, Portugal and France between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. An alternate etymology points to Michel Chevalier, who used the term in 1836.

Read more at Wikipedia.org