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The Latin peoples, also known as Romance peoples, are those European linguistic-cultural groups and their descendants all over the world that speak Romance languages. The Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin. The Latin peoples include:

* Andalusians (are an ethnic and cultural group in Spain centered in the Andalusia region.)
* Andorrans (A tiny country of southwest Europe between France and Spain in the eastern Pyrenees.)
* Aragonese (The Aragoneses are an ethnic group or nation living in the historical region of the Aragon, in the center and north east of Spain)
* Aromanians (are a people living throughout the southern Balkans, especially in northern Greece, Albania, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria, and as an emigrant community in Romania (Dobruja).
* Asturians (The Asturians are an ethnic group or nation living in the historical region of the Principality of Asturias, in the north of Spain. They have Iberian, Celtic and Visigothic background and they speak the Asturian language.)
* Catalans (The Catalans are an ethnic group or nation whose homeland is Catalonia, or the Principality of Catalonia, which is a historical region in southern Europe, embracing a territory situated in the north-east of Spain and an adjoining portion of southern France.)
* Castilians (The Castilian people are the inhabitants of the historical region of Castile. Through the Reconquista, they spreaded outside historical region of Castile all over the Iberian Peninsula, especially in the southern Spanish regions of Extremadura, Andalusia, Murcia and the Canary Islands.)
* Corsicans (An island of France in the Mediterranean Sea north of Sardinia. Napoleon Bonaparte was born on the island, which was ceded to France by Genoa in 1768.)
* French (In defining the French people, one must first distinguish between the legal sense of the term and the ethno-cultural sense.)
* French Swiss (Swiss French and the French of France are the same language, with some differences.)
* Galicians (The Galician people are the ethnic group or nation native to the Spanish autonomous community of Galicia, in the Iberian peninsula of southwest Europe.)
* Istro-Romanians (are an ethnic group living in Istria, Croatia with a population of 1,200. They traditionally speak the Istro-Romanian language.)
* Italians (The Italians are a Southern European ethnic group found primarily in Italy and in a wide-ranging diaspora throughout Western Europe, the Americas and Australia.)
* Italian Swiss (is a dialect or dialects of Italian spoken in Switzerland. This term may overlap with Ticinese, but may not necessarily be synonymous with it.)
* Megleno-Romanians or Moglenites
* Monégasques (Monaco is a principality on the Mediterranean Sea consisting of an enclave in southeast France.)
* Portuguese (are the ethnic group or nation native to the country of Portugal, in the west of the Iberian peninsula of southwest Europe. Portuguese is their native language and Roman Catholicism is their predominant religion.)
* Romanians and Moldovans (The Romanian people are a nation in the meaning an ethnos (in Romanian: popor;defined more by a sense of sharing a common Romanian culture and having a Romanian mother tongue, than by citizenship or by being subjects to any particular country.)
* Romansh Swiss (is one of the four national languages of Switzerland, along with German, Italian and French.)
* Sammarinese (San Marino is a country in the Apennines near the Adriatic Sea. It is surrounded by Italy and is the world's smallest republic.)
* Sardinians (Sardinia is an island of Italy in the Mediterranean Sea south of Corsica.)
* Sicilians (Sicilia is an island of southern Italy in the Mediterranean Sea west of the southern end of the Italian peninsula.
* Spaniards (The Spanish people or Spaniards are a nation native to Spain, in the Iberian Peninsula of southwestern Europe.)
* Vlachs (is a blanket term covering several modern Latin peoples descending from the Latinised population in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe.)
* Walloons (group of people living in S Belgium who traditionally spoke a dialect of French called Walloon, but who today for the most part speak standard French.)

Source: www.answers.com

The English word Latino (Latina is the feminine form) may have derived from the Spanish word latinoamericano and most often refers to inhabitants of Latin America, and their descendents in the United States. It is the abbreviated use of 'Latin-American'; Francophone Canadians are not normally referred to as Latino, even though they speak a Romance language. A Latino person may be of any race ( Amerindian, Mixed Amerindian and white, white, black, and Asian). Although they are mostly of Amerindian descent(South Native Americans). The concept of "Latin America" was coined by the French in the 1800s as a means of legitimizing French influence over the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas; compare Latin Europe. Napoleon III, cited Amérique Latine and Indochine as goals for expansion during his reign. He proposed the Monarchy in Mexico headed by the Austrian Archduke Maximillian or Maximilian I of Mexico. The term emphasized a common culture and history of the Romance language-speaking countries, as opposed to the Germanic language-speaking countries of "Anglo-America".

Since its official adoption in 1997, the definition and usage of the term by the Federal Government is strictly as an ethnic, as opposed to racial, identifier, used together with the term Hispanic.

Authorities of American English maintain a distinction between the terms Hispanic and Latino. Latino is not officially used as a racial label, as a 'Latino' or 'Latin American' can be of any race.

Latino is sometimes used interchangeably with the following terms:

Latin refers to the Latin peoples (linguistic), i.e. Romance-speaking Europeans, and those tracing most of their ancestry to them.

The term Latin is sometimes synonymous with Latino or Latin American, e.g. Latin jazz, Latin music. The Latin Grammy Awards is an event in which many Latins, including Brazilians and Spaniards, Puerto Ricans, Mexican, Colombian, etc, participate.

A Latin American is a national of a Latin American country.

Official use of the term Hispanic has its origins in the 1970 United States Census. The Census Bureau attempted to identify all Hispanics by use of the following criteria in sampled sets:

* Spanish speakers and persons belonging to a household where Spanish was spoken[citation needed]
* Persons with Spanish heritage by birth location[citation needed]
* Persons who self-identify with Spanish ancestry or descent

Spanish people are nationals of Spain and those who trace their descent to Spain directly, not via a Latin American or other country.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org