While doing an assignment the other day on foreign direct investment in Latin America, it occurred to me that it is rather odd that we use this term to refer to a region that never had any contact with the classical "Latin" empire. Is this just semantics, or is there some connection to the Roman Empire that I'm missing?
They speak Spanish or Portuguese, for the most part, Latin-derived languages. That and Spain and Portugal had claims over most of the land when the Americas were first heavily explored by Europeans.
Also note that North America, with the exception of Mexico and Québec, is known as Teutonic, or "German America," considering the influence Germanic civilization (British founding and institutions, prominence of the English language and related culture, German-majority population in the US, etc) has had on the United States and Canada.