What criteria does a language have to meet to be considered a Romance language?

Answer 1

The category of "Romance" is not determined by grammatical information so much as by the history of a language. Romance languages are those descended from the Roman language--i.e., Latin. So some examples of these beyond the standard Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese are languages like Galician, Sicilian, Leonese, etc. All of these languages certainly share many characteristics, such as in the way that their grammatical and inflectional systems work, but the main thing that categorizes a language as Romance is its relation to Latin.