The Portuguese language developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from Latin spoken by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC. Old Portuguese, also known as Galician-Portuguese, began to diverge from other Romance languages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Germanic invasions, also known as barbarian invasions in the 5th century and started appearing in written documents around the 9th century. By the 13th century, Galician-Portuguese had become a mature language with its own literature and began to split into two languages. However, the debate of whether Galician and Portuguese are nowadays varieties of the same language, much like American English or British English, is still present. In all aspects—phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax—Portugue