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The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from
Vulgar Latin Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Through time, Vulgar Latin would evolve into numerous Romance languages. Its literary counterpa ...
. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language family. The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish (489 million), Portuguese (283 million),
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
(77 million), Italian (67 million) and
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania ** Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
(24 million), which are all national languages of their respective countries of origin. By most measures, Sardinian and Italian are the least divergent from Latin, while French has changed the most. However, all Romance languages are closer to each other than to classical Latin. There are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the
Americas The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America, North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World. ...
,
Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...
, and parts of
Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...
. The major Romance languages also have many non-native speakers and are in widespread use as
linguae francae A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...
.M. Paul Lewis,
Summary by language size
, ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth Edition''.
Because it is difficult to assign rigid categories to phenomena such as languages which exist on a continuum, estimates of the number of modern Romance languages vary. For example, Dalby lists 23, based on the criterion of
mutual intelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as ...
. The following includes those and additional current, living languages, and one
extinct language An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers, especially if the language has no living descendants. In contrast, a dead language is one that is no longer the native language of any community, even if it is still in use, l ...
, Dalmatian: *
Ibero-Romance The Iberian Romance, Ibero-Romance or sometimes Iberian languagesIberian languages is also used as a more inclusive term for all languages spoken on the Iberian Peninsula, which in antiquity included the non-Indo-European Iberian language. are a ...
: Portuguese/ Galician, Asturleonese/
Mirandese The Mirandese language ( mwl, mirandés, links=no or ''lhéngua mirandesa''; pt, mirandês or ) is an Astur-Leonese language or language variety that is sparsely spoken in a small area of northeastern Portugal in Terra de Miranda (made up of ...
, Spanish, Aragonese, Ladino; * Occitano-Romance:
Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
/ Valencian, Occitan (lenga d'oc), Gascon (sometimes considered part of Occitan); *
Gallo-Romance The Gallo-Romance branch of the Romance languages includes in the narrowest sense the Langues d'oïl and Franco-Provençal. However, other definitions are far broader, variously encompassing the Occitano-Romance, Gallo-Italic, and Rhaeto-Rom ...
:
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
/ Oïl languages, Franco-Provençal (Arpitan); * Rhaeto-Romance: Romansh,
Ladin Ladin may refer to: *Ladin language, a language in northern Italy, often classified as a Rhaeto-Romance language *Ladin people, the inhabitants of the Dolomite Alps region of northern Italy See also *Laden (disambiguation) *Ladino (disambiguati ...
, Friulian; * Gallo-Italic: Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Emilian, Romagnol; * Venetian (classification disputed); *
Italo-Dalmatian The Italo-Dalmatian languages, or Central Romance languages, are a group of Romance languages spoken in Italy, Corsica (France), and formerly in Dalmatia (Croatia). Italo-Dalmatian can be split into:Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspe ...
: Italian ( Tuscan, Corsican,
Sassarese Sassarese (natively ''sassaresu'' or ''turritanu''; sc, tataresu ) is an Italo-Dalmatian language and transitional variety between Sardinian and Corsican. It is regarded as a Corso– Sardinian language because of Sassari's historic ties ...
, Central Italian), Sicilian/ Estreme Southern Italian,
Neapolitan Neapolitan means of or pertaining to Naples, a city in Italy; or to: Geography and history * Province of Naples, a province in the Campania region of southern Italy that includes the city * Duchy of Naples, in existence during the Early and Hig ...
/ Southern Italian, Dalmatian (extinct in 1898),
Istriot The Istriot language () is a Romance language of the Italo-Dalmatian branch spoken by about 400 people in the southwestern part of the Istrian peninsula in Croatia, particularly in Rovinj and Vodnjan. It should not be confused with the Istri ...
; *
Eastern Romance The Eastern Romance languages are a group of Romance languages. Today, the group consists of the Daco-Romance subgroup, which comprises the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian), Aromanian language and two other related minor languages, Megleno-R ...
:
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania ** Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian; * Sardinian.


Name

The term '' Romance'' derives from the Vulgar Latin adverb , "in
Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy * Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lett ...
", derived from : for instance, in the expression , "to speak in Roman" (that is, the Latin vernacular), contrasted with , "to speak in Latin" (
Medieval Latin Medieval Latin was the form of Literary Latin used in Roman Catholic Western Europe during the Middle Ages. In this region it served as the primary written language, though local languages were also written to varying degrees. Latin functioned ...
, the conservative version of the language used in writing and formal contexts or as a lingua franca), and with , "to speak in Barbarian" (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the
Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Roman Republic, Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings aro ...
). From this adverb the noun ''romance'' originated, which applied initially to anything written , or "in the Roman vernacular".


Samples

Lexical and grammatical similarities among the Romance languages, and between Latin and each of them, are apparent from the following examples in various Romance
lect In sociolinguistics, a variety, also called an isolect or lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety.Meecham ...
s, all meaning 'She always closes the window before she dines/before dining'. : : Some of the divergence comes from semantic change: where the same root words have developed different meanings. For example, the Portuguese word is descended from Latin "window" (and is thus cognate to French , Italian , Romanian and so on), but now means "skylight" and "slit". Cognates may exist but have become rare, such as in Spanish, or dropped out of use entirely. The Spanish and Portuguese terms meaning "to throw through a window" and meaning "replete with windows" also have the same root, but are later borrowings from Latin. Likewise, Portuguese also has the word , a cognate of Italian and Spanish , but uses it in the sense of "to have a late supper" in most varieties, while the preferred word for "to dine" is (related to archaic Spanish "to eat") because of semantic changes in the 19th century. Galician has both (from medieval ''fẽestra'', the ancestor of standard Portuguese ) and the less frequently used and . As an alternative to (originally the genitive form), Italian has the pronoun , a cognate of the other words for "she", but it is hardly ever used in speaking. Spanish, Asturian, and Leonese and Mirandese and Sardinian come from Latin "wind" (cf. English ''window'', etymologically 'wind eye'), and Portuguese , Galician , Mirandese from Latin * "small opening", a derivative of "door". Sardinian (alternative for /) comes from Old Italian and is similar to other Romance languages such as French (from Italian ), Portuguese , Romanian , Spanish , Catalan and Corsican (alternative for ).


Classification and related languages

The classification of the Romance languages is inherently difficult, because most of the linguistic area is a dialect continuum, and in some cases political biases can come into play. Along with Latin (which is not included among the Romance languages) and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, they make up the Italic branch of the Indo-European family. By most nonhistorical measures, standard Italian is a “central” language (i.e., it is quite close and often readily intelligible to all other Romance languages), whereas French and Romanian are peripheral (they lack similarity to other Romance languages and require more effort for other Romance speakers to understand them).


Proposed divisions

There are various schemes used to subdivide the Romance languages. Three of the most common schemes are as follows: *Italo-Western vs. Eastern vs. Southern. This is the scheme followed by Ethnologue, and is based primarily on the outcome of the ten monophthong vowels in Classical Latin. This is discussed more
below Below may refer to: *Earth * Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor * Bottom (disambiguation) *Less than *Temperatures below freezing *Hell or underworld People with the surname *Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general *Fred Below ...
. *West vs. East. This scheme divides the various languages along the La Spezia–Rimini Line, which runs across north-central Italy just to the north of the city of
Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico ...
(whose speech forms the basis of standard Italian). In this scheme, "East" includes the languages of central and southern Italy, and the Balkan Romance (or "Eastern Romance") languages in Romania, Greece, and elsewhere in the Balkans; "West" includes the languages of Portugal, Spain, France, northern Italy and Switzerland. Sardinian does not easily fit in this scheme. *" Conservative" vs. "innovatory". This is a non-genetic division whose precise boundaries are subject to debate. Generally, the Gallo-Romance languages (discussed further below) form the core "innovatory" languages, with standard French generally considered the most innovatory of all, while the languages near the periphery (which include Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian) are "conservative". Sardinian is generally acknowledged the most conservative Romance language, and was also the first language to split off genetically from the rest, possibly as early as the first century BC.
Dante Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: ' ...
famously denigrated the Sardinians for the conservativeness of their speech, remarking that they imitate Latin "like monkeys imitate men".


Italo-Western vs. Eastern vs. Sardinian

The main subfamilies that have been proposed by Ethnologue within the various classification schemes for Romance languages are: *
Italo-Western Italo-Western is, in some classifications, the largest branch of the Romance languages. It comprises two of the branches of Romance languages: Italo-Dalmatian and Western Romance. It excludes the Sardinian language and Eastern Romance. Italo-Dal ...
, the largest group, which includes languages such as Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and French. *
Eastern Romance The Eastern Romance languages are a group of Romance languages. Today, the group consists of the Daco-Romance subgroup, which comprises the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian), Aromanian language and two other related minor languages, Megleno-R ...
, which includes the Romance languages of Eastern Europe, such as Romanian. * Southern Romance, which includes a few languages with particularly conservative features, such as Sardinian and, according to some authors, Corsican as well to a more limited extent. This family is thought to have included the now-vanished Romance languages of North Africa (or at least, they appear to have evolved some phonological features and their vowels in the same way). This three-way division is made primarily based on the outcome of Vulgar Latin (Proto-Romance) vowels: Italo-Western is in turn split along the so-called '' La Spezia–Rimini Line'' in northern Italy, which divides the central and southern Italian languages from the so-called Western Romance languages to the north and west. The primary characteristics dividing the two are: *Phonemic lenition of intervocalic stops, which happens to the northwest but not to the southeast. *De
gemination In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
of geminate stops (producing new intervocalic single voiceless stops, after the old ones were lenited), which again happens to the northwest but not to the southeast. *Deletion of intertonic vowels (between the stressed syllable and either the first or last syllable), again in the northwest but not the southeast. *Use of plurals in /s/ in the northwest vs. plurals using vowel change in the southeast. *Development of palatalized /k/ before /e,i/ to in the northwest vs. in the southeast. *Development of , which develops to > (sometimes progressing further to ) in the northwest but in the southeast. The reality is somewhat more complex. All of the "southeast" characteristics apply to all languages southeast of the line, and all of the "northwest" characteristics apply to all languages in France and (most of) Spain. However, the
Gallo-Italic languages The Gallo-Italic, Gallo-Italian, Gallo-Cisalpine or simply Cisalpine languages constitute the majority of the Romance languages of northern Italy. They are Piedmontese, Lombard, Emilian, Ligurian, and Romagnol. Although most publications def ...
are somewhere in between. All of these languages do have the "northwest" characteristics of lenition and loss of gemination. However: *The Gallo‒Italic languages have vowel-changing plurals rather than /s/ plurals. *The Lombard language in north-central Italy and the Rhaeto-Romance languages have the "southeast" characteristic of instead of for palatalized /k/. *The Venetian language in northeast Italy and some of the Rhaeto-Romance languages have the "southeast" characteristic of developing to . *Lenition of post-vocalic /p t k/ is widespread as an allophonic phonetic realization in Italy below the La Spezia-Rimini line, including Corsica and most of Sardinia. On top of this, the medieval Mozarabic language in southern Spain, at the far end of the "northwest" group, may have had the "southeast" characteristics of lack of lenition and palatalization of /k/ to . Certain languages around the Pyrenees (e.g. some highland Aragonese dialects) also lack lenition, and northern French dialects such as Norman and Picard have palatalization of /k/ to (although this is possibly an independent, secondary development, since /k/ between vowels, i.e. when subject to lenition, developed to /dz/ rather than , as would be expected for a primary development). The usual solution to these issues is to create various nested subgroups. Western Romance is split into the Gallo-Iberian languages, in which lenition happens and which include nearly all the Western Romance languages, and the Pyrenean-Mozarabic group, which includes the remaining languages without lenition (and is unlikely to be a valid clade; probably at least two clades, one for Mozarabic and one for Pyrenean). Gallo-Iberian is split in turn into the Iberian languages (e.g. Spanish and Portuguese), and the larger Gallo-Romance languages (stretching from eastern Spain to northeast Italy). Probably a more accurate description, however, would be to say that there was a focal point of innovation located in central France, from which a series of innovations spread out as
areal change In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a proto-language, or, common ancestor language. That is, an areal feature is contrasted ...
s. The La Spezia–Rimini Line represents the farthest point to the southeast that these innovations reached, corresponding to the northern chain of the Apennine Mountains, which cuts straight across northern Italy and forms a major geographic barrier to further language spread. This would explain why some of the "northwest" features (almost all of which can be characterized as innovations) end at differing points in northern Italy, and why some of the languages in geographically remote parts of Spain (in the south, and high in the Pyrenees) are lacking some of these features. It also explains why the languages in France (especially standard French) seem to have innovated earlier and more extensively than other Western Romance languages. Many of the "southeast" features also apply to the Eastern Romance languages (particularly, Romanian), despite the geographic discontinuity. Examples are lack of lenition, maintenance of intertonic vowels, use of vowel-changing plurals, and palatalization of /k/ to . This has led some researchers, following
Walther von Wartburg Walther von Wartburg (-Boos) (18 May 1888; Riedholz – 15 August 1971; Basel) was a Swiss philologist and lexicographer. He was the editor-in-chief of the '' Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch'' (FEW). After studying at the universiti ...
, to postulate a basic two-way east–west division, with the "Eastern" languages including Romanian and central and southern Italian, although this view is troubled by the contrast of numerous Romanian phonological developments with those found in Italy below the La Spezia-Rimini line. Among these features, in Romanian geminates reduced historically to single units, and /kt/ developed into /pt/, whereas in central and southern Italy geminates are preserved and /kt/ underwent assimilation to /tt/. Despite being the first Romance language to diverge from spoken Latin, Sardinian does not fit at all into this sort of division. It is clear that Sardinian became linguistically independent from the remainder of the Romance languages at an extremely early date, possibly already by the first century BC. Sardinian contains a large number of archaic features, including total lack of palatalization of /k/ and /ɡ/ and a large amount of vocabulary preserved nowhere else, including some items already archaic by the time of Classical Latin (first century BC). Sardinian has plurals in /s/ but post-vocalic lenition of voiceless consonants is normally limited to the status of an allophonic rule (e.g. 'ane'' 'dog' but ''su'' 'ane'' or ''su'' 'ane'' 'the dog'), and there are a few innovations unseen elsewhere, such as a change of /au/ to /a/. Use of ''su'' < ''ipsum'' as an article is a retained archaic feature that also exists in the Catalan of the Balearic Islands and that used to be more widespread in Occitano-Romance, and is known as ' (literally the "salted article"), while Sardinian shares develarisation of earlier /kw/ and /ɡw/ with Romanian: Sard. ''abba'', Rum. ''apă'' 'water'; Sard. ''limba'', Rom. ''limbă'' 'language' (cf. Italian ''acqua'', ''lingua'').


= Dialects of southern Italy, Sardinia and Corsica

= The Sardinian-type vowel system is also found in a small region belonging to the (also known as '' Lausberg zone''; compare ) of southern Italy, in southern Basilicata, and there is evidence that the Romanian-type "compromise" vowel system was once characteristic of most of southern Italy, although it is now limited to a small area in western Basilicata centered on the
Castelmezzano dialect The dialect of Castelmezzano is a Romance variety spoken in Castelmezzano in the Province of Potenza in Italy. It constitutes a dialect of the Neapolitan language that differs from the rest (and from neighbouring imported Gallo-Italic varieties ...
, the area being known as , the German word for 'outpost'. The
Sicilian vowel system The Sicilian vowel system is characteristic of the dialects of Sicily, Southern Calabria, Cilento and Salento. It may alternatively be referred to as the ''Sicilian vocalic scheme'' or the ''Calabro-Sicilian vowel system''. The Sicilian vowel s ...
, now generally thought to be a development based on the Italo-Western system, is also represented in southern Italy, in southern Cilento, Calabria and the southern tip of Apulia, and may have been more widespread in the past. The greatest variety of vowel systems outside of southern Italy is found in Corsica, where the Italo-Western type is represented in most of the north and center and the Sardinian type in the south, as well as a system resembling the Sicilian vowel system (and even more closely the Carovignese system) in the
Cap Corse Cap Corse (; co, Capicorsu, ; it, Capo Corso, ), a geographical area of Corsica, is a long peninsula located at the northern tip of the island. At the base of it is the second largest city in Corsica, Bastia. Cap Corse is also a Communauté de ...
region; finally, in between the Italo-Western and Sardinian system is found, in the
Taravo The Taravo ( co, Taravu, italic=no) is a river on the island of Corsica, France. It is long. Its source is in the mountainous middle of the island, southeast of Monte Renoso. It flows generally southwest, through Palneca, Cozzano and Guitera-le ...
region, a unique vowel system that cannot be derived from any other system, which has reflexes like Sardinian for the most part, but the short high vowels of Latin are uniquely reflected as mid-low vowels. Compar
comment 1 at the blog Language Hat
an
comment 2


Gallo-Romance languages

Gallo-Romance can be divided into the following subgroups: *The Langues d'oïl, including
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
and closely related languages. *The
Franco-Provençal language Franco-Provençal (also Francoprovençal, Patois or Arpitan) is a language within Gallo-Romance originally spoken in east-central France, western Switzerland and northwestern Italy. Franco-Provençal has several distinct dialects and is sepa ...
(also known as Arpitan) of southeastern France, western Switzerland, and Aosta Valley region of northwestern Italy. The following groups are also sometimes considered part of Gallo-Romance: *The Occitano-Romance languages of southern France, namely Occitan and Gascon. **The
Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
language of eastern Iberia is also sometimes included in Gallo-Romance. This is however disputed by some linguists who prefer to group it with Iberian Romance, since although Old Catalan is close to Old Occitan, it later adjusted its lexicon to some degree to align with Spanish. In general however, modern Catalan, especially grammatically, remains closer to modern Occitan than to either Spanish or Portuguese. *The Gallo-Italian languages of northern Italy, including Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Emilian and Romagnol. Ligurian retains the final -o, being the exception in Gallo-Romance. *The Rhaeto-Romance languages, including Romansh, and Friulian, and
Ladin Ladin may refer to: *Ladin language, a language in northern Italy, often classified as a Rhaeto-Romance language *Ladin people, the inhabitants of the Dolomite Alps region of northern Italy See also *Laden (disambiguation) *Ladino (disambiguati ...
dialects. The Gallo-Romance languages are generally considered the most innovative (least conservative) among the Romance languages. Characteristic Gallo-Romance features generally developed earliest and appear in their most extreme manifestation in the Langue d'oïl, gradually spreading out along riverways and transalpine roads. In some ways, however, the Gallo-Romance languages are conservative. The older stages of many of the languages preserved a two-case system consisting of nominative and oblique, fully marked on nouns, adjectives and determiners, inherited almost directly from the Latin nominative and accusative and preserving a number of different declensional classes and irregular forms. The languages closest to the oïl epicenter preserve the case system the best, while languages at the periphery lose it early. Notable characteristics of the Gallo-Romance languages are: *Early loss of unstressed final vowels other than — a defining characteristic of the group. **Further reductions of final vowels in Langue d'oïl and many
Gallo-Italic languages The Gallo-Italic, Gallo-Italian, Gallo-Cisalpine or simply Cisalpine languages constitute the majority of the Romance languages of northern Italy. They are Piedmontese, Lombard, Emilian, Ligurian, and Romagnol. Although most publications def ...
, with the feminine and
prop vowel In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable ('' prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The word ''epenth ...
merging into , which is often subsequently dropped. *Early, heavy reduction of unstressed vowels in the interior of a word (another defining characteristic). *Loss of final vowels phonemicized the long vowels that used to be automatic concomitants of stressed open syllables. These phonemic long vowels are maintained directly in many Northern Italian dialects; elsewhere, phonemic length was lost, but in the meantime many of the long vowels diphthongized, resulting in a maintenance of the original distinction. The langue d'oïl branch is again at the forefront of innovation, with no less than five of the seven long vowels diphthongizing (only high vowels were spared). * Front rounded vowels are present in all branches of Gallo-Romance. usually fronts to , and secondary mid front rounded vowels often develop from long or . *Extreme lenition (i.e. multiple rounds of lenition) occurs in many languages especially in Langue d'oïl and many Gallo-Italian languages. *The Langue d'oïl, Swiss Rhaeto-Romance languages and many of the northern dialects of Occitan have a secondary palatalization of and before , producing different results from the primary Romance palatalization: e.g. ''centum'' "hundred" > ''cent'' , ''cantum'' "song" > ''chant'' . *Other than the Occitano-Romance languages, most Gallo-Romance languages are subject-obligatory (whereas all the rest of the Romance languages are
pro-drop A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language where certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite i ...
languages). This is a late development triggered by progressive phonetic erosion: Old French was still a null-subject language, and this only changed upon loss of secondarily final consonants in Middle French.


Pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages

Some Romance languages have developed varieties which seem dramatically restructured as to their grammars or to be mixtures with other languages. There are several dozens of creoles of
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
, Spanish, and Portuguese origin, some of them spoken as national languages and lingua franca in former European colonies. Creoles of French: *
Antillean The Antilles (; gcf, label=Antillean Creole, Antiy; es, Antillas; french: Antilles; nl, Antillen; ht, Antiy; pap, Antias; Jamaican Patois: ''Antiliiz'') is an archipelago bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the south and west, the Gulf of Mex ...
( French Antilles, Saint Lucia, Dominica; majority native language) * Haitian (one of Haiti's two official languages and majority native language) *
Louisiana Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 20th-smallest by area and the 25th most populous of the 50 U.S. states. Louisiana is bord ...
(US) *
Mauritian Mauritians (singular Mauritian; french: Mauricien; Creole: ''Morisien'') are nationals or natives of the Republic of Mauritius and their descendants. Mauritius is a multi-ethnic society, with notable groups of people of South Asian (notabl ...
('' lingua franca'' of
Mauritius Mauritius ( ; french: Maurice, link=no ; mfe, label= Mauritian Creole, Moris ), officially the Republic of Mauritius, is an island nation in the Indian Ocean about off the southeast coast of the African continent, east of Madagascar. It ...
) * Réunion (native language of Réunion) *
Seychellois This article is about the demographic features of the population of Seychelles, including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population. About 9 ...
( Seychelles' official language) Creoles of Spanish: * Chavacano (in part of
Philippines The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no), * bik, Republika kan Filipinas * ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas * cbk, República de Filipinas * hil, Republ ...
) * Palenquero (in part of Colombia) Creoles of Portuguese: *
Angolar Angolar Creole ( aoa, n'golá) is a minority Portuguese-based creole language of São Tomé and Príncipe, spoken in the southernmost towns of São Tomé Island and sparsely along the coast, especially by Angolar people. It is also called ...
(regional language in São Tomé and Principe) * Cape Verdean ( Cape Verde's national language and lingua franca; includes several distinct varieties) * Daman and Diu Creole (regional language in
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...
) * Forro (regional language in São Tomé and Príncipe) * Kristang (
Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federal constitutional monarchy consists of thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two regions: Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo's East Mal ...
and
Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...
) * Kristi (regional language in India) * Macanese ( Macau) * Papiamento ( Dutch Antilles official language, majority native language, and lingua franca) * Guinea-Bissau Creole ( Guinea-Bissau's national language and lingua franca)


Auxiliary and constructed languages

Latin and the Romance languages have also served as the inspiration and basis of numerous auxiliary and constructed languages, so-called "Neo-Romance languages". The concept was first developed in 1903 by Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano, under the title Latino sine flexione.Peano, Giuseppe (1903)
"De Latino Sine Flexione. Lingua Auxiliare Internationale"
''Revista de Mathematica'' (''Revue de Mathématiques''), Tomo VIII, pp. 74–83. Fratres Bocca Editores: Torino.
He wanted to create a ''naturalistic'' international language, as opposed to an autonomous constructed language like Esperanto or Volapük which were designed for maximal simplicity of lexicon and derivation of words. Peano used Latin as the base of his language because, as he described it, Latin had been the international scientific language until the end of the 18th century. Other languages developed include Idiom Neutral (1902), Interlingue-Occidental (1922), Interlingua (1951) and Lingua Franca Nova (1998). The most famous and successful of these is Interlingua. Each of these languages has attempted to varying degrees to achieve a pseudo-Latin vocabulary as common as possible to living Romance languages. Some languages have been constructed specifically for communication among speakers of Romance languages, the
Pan-Romance language A pan-Romance language or Romance interlanguage is a codified linguistic variety which synthesizes the variation of the Romance languages and is representative of these as a whole. It can be seen as a standard language proposal for the whole l ...
s. There are also languages created for artistic purposes only, such as Talossan. Because Latin is a very well attested ancient language, some amateur linguists have even constructed Romance languages that mirror real languages that developed from other ancestral languages. These include
Brithenig Brithenig, or also known as Comroig, is an invented language, or constructed language ("conlang"). It was created as a hobby in 1996 by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, who also invented the alternate history of Ill Bethisad to "explain" it. Offi ...
(which mirrors
Welsh Welsh may refer to: Related to Wales * Welsh, referring or related to Wales * Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales * Welsh people People * Welsh (surname) * Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peopl ...
), Breathanach (mirrors Irish),
Wenedyk Venedic is a naturalistic constructed language, created by the Dutch translator Jan van Steenbergen (who also co-created the international auxiliary language Interslavic). It is used in the fictional ''Republic of the Two Crowns'', based on t ...
(mirrors Polish), Þrjótrunn (mirrors Icelandic), and Helvetian (mirrors
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...
).


Modern status

The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish, followed by Portuguese,
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
, Italian and
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania ** Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
, which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries. French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of the
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...
. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan were the official languages of the defunct
Latin Union The Latin Union is an international organization of nations that use Romance languages, whose activities have been suspended since 2012. Headquartered in Paris, France, its aim is to protect, project, and promote the common cultural heritage of ...
; and French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the
United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoni ...
. Outside Europe,
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
, Portuguese and Spanish are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that emerged from the respective colonial empires. Spanish is an official language in
Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = '' Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , ...
and in nine countries of
South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sou ...
, home to about half that continent's population; in six countries of Central America (all except
Belize Belize (; bzj, Bileez) is a Caribbean and Central American country on the northeastern coast of Central America. It is bordered by Mexico to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and Guatemala to the west and south. It also shares a wa ...
); and in
Mexico Mexico (Spanish language, Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a List of sovereign states, country in the southern portion of North America. It is borders of Mexico, bordered to the north by the United States; to the so ...
. In the
Caribbean The Caribbean (, ) ( es, El Caribe; french: la Caraïbe; ht, Karayib; nl, De Caraïben) is a region of the Americas that consists of the Caribbean Sea, its islands (some surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and some bordering both the Caribbean ...
, it is official in
Cuba Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribb ...
, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. In all these countries, Latin American Spanish is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish the most native speakers of any Romance language. In Africa it is one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea.. Portuguese, in its original homeland,
Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of th ...
, is spoken by virtually the entire population of 10 million. As the official language of
Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
, it is spoken by more than 200 million people in that country, as well as by neighboring residents of eastern Paraguay and northern Uruguay, accounting for a little more than half the population of South America, thus making Portuguese the most spoken official Romance language in a single country. It is the official language of six African countries ( Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea, and São Tomé and Príncipe), and is spoken as a primary language by perhaps 30 million residents of that continent, most of them second-language speakers. In Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages in
East Timor East Timor (), also known as Timor-Leste (), officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, is an island country in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the exclave of Oecusse on the island's north-w ...
and Macau, while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia—some 400,000—are in
Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...
due to return immigration of Japanese Brazilians. In North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language. In Oceania, Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in
East Timor East Timor (), also known as Timor-Leste (), officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, is an island country in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the exclave of Oecusse on the island's north-w ...
. Its closest relative, Galician, has official status in the autonomous community of Galicia in
Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = '' Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , ...
, together with Spanish. Outside Europe, French is spoken natively most in the Canadian province of
Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirte ...
, and in parts of
New Brunswick New Brunswick (french: Nouveau-Brunswick, , locally ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is one of the three Maritime provinces and one of the four Atlantic provinces. It is the only province with both English and ...
and
Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...
. Canada is officially bilingual, with French and English being the official languages. In parts of the Caribbean, such as Haiti, French has official status, but most people speak creoles such as Haitian Creole as their native language. French also has official status in much of Africa, with relatively few native speakers but larger numbers of second language speakers. French is spoken by around 200 to 300 million people in 2022 according to Ethnologue and the OIF. In
Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...
,
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
is spoken by 71 million native speakers and nearly 200 million Europeans can speak French, making French, the second most spoken language in Europe after
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
. French is also the second most studied language in the world behind
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
, with about 130 million learners in 2017. Although
Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
also had some colonial possessions before
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
, its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial domination. As a result, Italian outside of Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities in North and
South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sou ...
and
Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by ...
. In some former Italian colonies in Africa—namely Libya, Eritrea and Somalia—it is spoken by a few educated people in commerce and government.
Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern, and Southeast Europe, Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, S ...
did not establish a colonial empire, and the native range of Romanian includes not only the former Soviet republic of
Moldova Moldova ( , ; ), officially the Republic of Moldova ( ro, Republica Moldova), is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. The unrecognised state of Transnistri ...
, where it is the dominant language and spoken by a majority of the population, but neighboring areas in Serbia ( Vojvodina and the Bor District), Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ukraine ( Bukovina,
Budjak Budjak or Budzhak ( Bulgarian and Ukrainian: Буджак; ro, Bugeac; Gagauz and Turkish: ''Bucak''), historically part of Bessarabia until 1812, is a historical region in Ukraine and Moldova. Lying along the Black Sea between the Danu ...
) and in some villages between the Dniester and Bug rivers. As with Italian, Romanian is spoken outside of its ethnic range by immigrant communities, such as other European countries (notably
Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
,
Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = '' Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , ...
, and
Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of th ...
, where in all three of which Romanian-speakers form about two percent of the population), as well as to
Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...
by Romanian Jews, where it is the native language of five percent of the population, and is spoken by many more as a secondary language. The Aromanian language is spoken today by
Aromanians The Aromanians ( rup, Armãnji, Rrãmãnji) are an ethnic group native to the southern Balkans who speak Aromanian, an Eastern Romance language. They traditionally live in central and southern Albania, south-western Bulgaria, northern and ...
in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, and Greece. The total of 880 million native speakers of Romance languages (ca. 2020) are divided as follows: * Spanish 54% (475 million, plus 75 million L2 for 550 million Hispanophones) * Portuguese 26% (230 million, plus 30 million L2 for 260 million Lusophones) *
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
9% (80 million, plus 195 million L2 for 275 million Francophones) * Italian 7% (65 million, plus 3 million L2) *
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania ** Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
3% (24 million) *
Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
0.5% (4 million, plus 5 million L2) *Others 3% (26 million, nearly all bilingual in one of the national languages) Catalan is the official language of Andorra. In Spain, it is co-official with Spanish in
Catalonia Catalonia (; ca, Catalunya ; Aranese Occitan: ''Catalonha'' ; es, Cataluña ) is an autonomous community of Spain, designated as a '' nationality'' by its Statute of Autonomy. Most of the territory (except the Val d'Aran) lies on the no ...
, the Valencian Community (under the name Valencian), and the Balearic Islands, and it is recognized, but not official, in an area of Aragon known as La Franja. In addition, it is spoken by many residents of Alghero, on the island of Sardinia, and it is co-official in that city. Galician, with more than a million native speakers, is official together with Spanish in Galicia, and has legal recognition in neighbouring territories in Castilla y León. A few other languages have official recognition on a regional or otherwise limited level; for instance, Asturian and Aragonese in Spain;
Mirandese The Mirandese language ( mwl, mirandés, links=no or ''lhéngua mirandesa''; pt, mirandês or ) is an Astur-Leonese language or language variety that is sparsely spoken in a small area of northeastern Portugal in Terra de Miranda (made up of ...
in Portugal; Friulian, Sardinian and Franco-Provençal in Italy; and Romansh in Switzerland. The remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact. National governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well as a potential source of separatist movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it, by extensively promoting the use of the official language, restricting the use of the other languages in the media, recognizing them as mere "dialects", or even persecuting them. As a result, all of these languages are considered endangered to varying degrees according to the UNESCO
Red Book of Endangered Languages The UNESCO ''Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger'' is an online publication containing a comprehensive list of the world's endangered languages. It originally replaced the ''Red Book of Endangered Languages'' as a title in print after ...
, ranging from "vulnerable" (e.g. Sicilian and
Venetian Venetian often means from or related to: * Venice, a city in Italy * Veneto, a region of Italy * Republic of Venice (697–1797), a historical nation in that area Venetian and the like may also refer to: * Venetian language, a Romance language s ...
) to "severely endangered" ( Franco-Provençal, most of the Occitan varieties). Since the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, increased sensitivity to the rights of minorities has allowed some of these languages to start recovering their prestige and lost rights. Yet it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of minority Romance languages.


History

Romance languages are the continuation of
Vulgar Latin Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Through time, Vulgar Latin would evolve into numerous Romance languages. Its literary counterpa ...
, the popular and colloquial sociolect of
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
spoken by
soldier A soldier is a person who is a member of an army. A soldier can be a Conscription, conscripted or volunteer Enlisted rank, enlisted person, a non-commissioned officer, or an Officer (armed forces), officer. Etymology The word ''soldier'' deri ...
s, settlers, and merchants of the
Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Roman Republic, Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings aro ...
, as distinguished from the classical form of the language spoken by the
Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy * Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lett ...
upper classes, the form in which the language was generally written. Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language in continental Western Europe. Latin also exerted a strong influence in southeastern Britain, the Roman province of Africa, western Germany, Pannonia and the whole
Balkans The Balkans ( ), also known as the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographical area in southeastern Europe with various geographical and historical definitions. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throughout the who ...
. During the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and the collapse of its Western half in the fifth and sixth centuries, the spoken varieties of Latin became more isolated from each other, with the western dialects coming under heavy Germanic influence (the Goths and Franks in particular) and the eastern dialects coming under Slavic influence. The dialects diverged from classical Latin at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. The colonial empires established by
Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of th ...
,
Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = '' Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , ...
, and
France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...
from the fifteenth century onward spread their languages to the other continents to such an extent that about two-thirds of all Romance language speakers today live outside Europe. Despite other influences (e.g. '' substratum'' from pre-Roman languages, especially
Continental Celtic languages The Continental Celtic languages are the now-extinct group of the Celtic languages that were spoken on the continent of Europe and in central Anatolia, as distinguished from the Insular Celtic languages of the British Isles and Brittany. ''Conti ...
; and '' superstratum'' from later Germanic or Slavic invasions), the
phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
, morphology, and lexicon of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin. However, some notable differences occur between today's Romance languages and their Roman ancestor. With only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the declension system of Latin and, as a result, have SVO sentence structure and make extensive use of prepositions.


Vulgar Latin

Documentary evidence is limited about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers, more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. In Western Europe, Latin gradually replaced
Celtic Celtic, Celtics or Keltic may refer to: Language and ethnicity *pertaining to Celts, a collection of Indo-European peoples in Europe and Anatolia **Celts (modern) *Celtic languages **Proto-Celtic language *Celtic music *Celtic nations Sports Foo ...
and other Italic languages, which were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin. Commonalities in syntax and vocabulary facilitated the adoption of Latin. Vulgar Latin is believed to have already had most of the features shared by all Romance languages, which distinguish them from Classical Latin, such as the almost complete loss of the Latin grammatical case system and its replacement by prepositions; the loss of the neuter
grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
and comparative inflections; replacement of some
verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...
paradigms by innovations (e.g. the
synthetic Synthetic things are composed of multiple parts, often with the implication that they are artificial. In particular, 'synthetic' may refer to: Science * Synthetic chemical or compound, produced by the process of chemical synthesis * Synthetic ...
future gave way to an originally
analytic Generally speaking, analytic (from el, ἀναλυτικός, ''analytikos'') refers to the "having the ability to analyze" or "division into elements or principles". Analytic or analytical can also have the following meanings: Chemistry * ...
strategy now typically formed by infinitive + evolved present indicative forms of 'have'); the use of
article Article often refers to: * Article (grammar), a grammatical element used to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness * Article (publishing), a piece of nonfictional prose that is an independent part of a publication Article may also refer to: ...
s; and the initial stages of the palatalization of the plosives /k/, /ɡ/, and /t/. To some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the
Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Roman Republic, Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings aro ...
(from the end of the first century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. Both were mutually intelligible as one and the same language, which was true until very approximately the second half of the 7th century. However, within two hundred years Latin became a
dead language An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers, especially if the language has no living descendants. In contrast, a dead language is one that is no longer the native language of any community, even if it is still in use, ...
since "the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them," i.e. Latin had ceased to be a
first language A first language, native tongue, native language, mother tongue or L1 is the first language or dialect that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' or ''mother to ...
and became a foreign language that had to be learned, if the label Latin is constrained to refer to a state of the language frozen in past time and restricted to linguistic features for the most part typical of higher registers. With the rise of the Roman Empire, Vulgar Latin spread first throughout Italy and then through
southern Southern may refer to: Businesses * China Southern Airlines, airline based in Guangzhou, China * Southern Airways, defunct US airline * Southern Air, air cargo transportation company based in Norwalk, Connecticut, US * Southern Airways Express, M ...
, western,
central Central is an adjective usually referring to being in the center of some place or (mathematical) object. Central may also refer to: Directions and generalised locations * Central Africa, a region in the centre of Africa continent, also known a ...
, and southeastern Europe, and northern Africa along parts of
western Asia Western Asia, West Asia, or Southwest Asia, is the westernmost subregion of the larger geographical region of Asia, as defined by some academics, UN bodies and other institutions. It is almost entirely a part of the Middle East, and includes A ...
.


Fall of the Western Roman Empire

During the political decline of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, there were large-scale migrations into the empire, and the Latin-speaking world was fragmented into several independent states. Central Europe and the
Balkans The Balkans ( ), also known as the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographical area in southeastern Europe with various geographical and historical definitions. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throughout the who ...
were occupied by Germanic and Slavic tribes, as well as by Huns. These incursions isolated the Vlachs from the rest of Romance-speaking Europe. British and African Romance—the forms of Vulgar Latin used in Britain and the Roman province of Africa, where it had been spoken by much of the urban population—disappeared in the Middle Ages (as did
Pannonian Romance Pannonian Romance was spoken by Romanized Celtic and Illyrian peoples that developed in Pannonia, between modern-day Vienna and Belgrade, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Despite the Romanized population being mentioned in several ...
in what is now Hungary, and
Moselle Romance Moselle Romance (german: Moselromanisch; french: Roman de la Moselle) is an extinct Gallo-Romance (most probably Langue d'oïl) dialect that developed after the fall of the Roman Empire along the Moselle river in modern-day Germany, near the b ...
in Germany). But the Germanic tribes that had penetrated Roman Italy,
Gaul Gaul ( la, Gallia) was a region of Western Europe first described by the Romans. It was inhabited by Celtic and Aquitani tribes, encompassing present-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg, most of Switzerland, parts of Northern Italy (only during ...
, and
Hispania Hispania ( la, Hispānia , ; nearly identically pronounced in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Italian) was the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula and its provinces. Under the Roman Republic, Hispania was divided into two provinces: Hi ...
eventually adopted Latin/Romance and the remnants of the culture of ancient Rome alongside existing inhabitants of those regions, and so Latin remained the dominant language there. In part due to regional dialects of the Latin language and local environments, several languages evolved from it.


Fall of the Eastern Roman empire

Meanwhile, large-scale migrations into the Eastern
Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Roman Republic, Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings aro ...
started with the
Goths The Goths ( got, 𐌲𐌿𐍄𐌸𐌹𐌿𐌳𐌰, translit=''Gutþiuda''; la, Gothi, grc-gre, Γότθοι, Gótthoi) were a Germanic people who played a major role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of medieval Euro ...
and continued with Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Slavs, Pechenegs,
Hungarians Hungarians, also known as Magyars ( ; hu, magyarok ), are a nation and  ethnic group native to Hungary () and historical Hungarian lands who share a common culture, history, ancestry, and language. The Hungarian language belongs to the ...
and Cumans. The invasions of Slavs were the most thoroughgoing, and they partially reduced the Romanic element in the
Balkans The Balkans ( ), also known as the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographical area in southeastern Europe with various geographical and historical definitions. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throughout the who ...
. The invasion of the Turks and conquest of Constantinople in 1453 marked the end of the empire. The Slavs named the Romance-speaking population Vlachs, while the latter called themselves "Rumân" or "Român", from the Latin "Romanus". The Daco-Roman dialect became fully distinct from the three dialects spoken South of the
Danube The Danube ( ; ) is a river that was once a long-standing frontier of the Roman Empire and today connects 10 European countries, running through their territories or being a border. Originating in Germany, the Danube flows southeast for , pa ...
—Aromanian, Istro-Romanian, and Megleno-Romanian—during the ninth and tenth centuries, when the
Romanians The Romanians ( ro, români, ; dated exonym '' Vlachs'') are a Romance-speaking ethnic group. Sharing a common Romanian culture and ancestry, and speaking the Romanian language, they live primarily in Romania and Moldova. The 2011 Romania ...
(sometimes called Vlachs or Wallachians) emerged as a people.


Early Romance

Over the course of the fourth to eighth centuries, local changes in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon accumulated to the point that the speech of any locale was noticeably different from another. In principle, differences between any two lects increased the more they were separated geographically, reducing easy mutual intelligibility between speakers of distant communities. Clear evidence of some levels of change is found in the ''
Reichenau Glosses The Reichenau Glossary is a collection of Latin glosses likely compiled in the 8th century in northern France to assist local clergy in understanding certain words or expressions found in the Vulgate Bible. Background Over the centuries Jerome� ...
'', an eighth-century compilation of about 1,200 words from the fourth-century Vulgate of Jerome that had changed in phonological form or were no longer normally used, along with their eighth-century equivalents in proto- Franco-Provençal. The following are some examples with reflexes in several modern Romance languages for comparison: In all of the above examples, the words appearing in the fourth century Vulgate are the same words as would have been used in Classical Latin of c. 50 BC. It is likely that some of these words had already disappeared from casual speech by the time of the ''Glosses''; but if so, they may well have been still widely understood, as there is no recorded evidence that the common people of the time had difficulty understanding the language. By the 8th century, the situation was very different. During the late 8th century,
Charlemagne Charlemagne ( , ) or Charles the Great ( la, Carolus Magnus; german: Karl der Große; 2 April 747 – 28 January 814), a member of the Carolingian dynasty, was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and the first E ...
, holding that "Latin of his age was by classical standards intolerably corrupt", successfully imposed Classical Latin as an artificial written vernacular for
Western Europe Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's countries and territories vary depending on context. The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the ancient Mediterranean ...
. Unfortunately, this meant that parishioners could no longer understand the sermons of their priests, forcing the Council of Tours in 813 to issue an edict that priests needed to translate their speeches into the ''rustica romana lingua'', an explicit acknowledgement of the reality of the Romance languages as separate languages from Latin. By this time, and possibly as early as the 6th century according to Price (1984), the Romance
lect In sociolinguistics, a variety, also called an isolect or lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety.Meecham ...
s had split apart enough to be able to speak of separate
Gallo-Romance The Gallo-Romance branch of the Romance languages includes in the narrowest sense the Langues d'oïl and Franco-Provençal. However, other definitions are far broader, variously encompassing the Occitano-Romance, Gallo-Italic, and Rhaeto-Rom ...
,
Ibero-Romance The Iberian Romance, Ibero-Romance or sometimes Iberian languagesIberian languages is also used as a more inclusive term for all languages spoken on the Iberian Peninsula, which in antiquity included the non-Indo-European Iberian language. are a ...
, Italo-Romance and
Eastern Romance languages The Eastern Romance languages are a group of Romance languages. Today, the group consists of the Daco-Romance subgroup, which comprises the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian), Aromanian language and two other related minor languages, Meglen ...
. Some researchers have postulated that the major divergences in the spoken dialects began or accelerated considerably in the 5th century, as the formerly widespread and efficient communication networks of the
Western Roman Empire The Western Roman Empire comprised the western provinces of the Roman Empire at any time during which they were administered by a separate independent Imperial court; in particular, this term is used in historiography to describe the period ...
rapidly broke down, leading to the total disappearance of the Western Roman Empire by the end of the century. The critical period between the 5th–10th centuries AD is poorly documented because little or no writing from the chaotic " Dark Ages" of the 5th–8th centuries has survived, and writing after that time was in consciously classicized
Medieval Latin Medieval Latin was the form of Literary Latin used in Roman Catholic Western Europe during the Middle Ages. In this region it served as the primary written language, though local languages were also written to varying degrees. Latin functioned ...
, with vernacular writing only beginning in earnest in the 11th or 12th century. An exception such as the
Oaths of Strasbourg The Oaths of Strasbourg were a military pact made on 14 February 842 by Charles the Bald and Louis the German against their older brother Lothair I, the designated heir of Louis the Pious, the successor of Charlemagne. One year later the T ...
is evidence that by the ninth century effective communication with a non-learnèd audience was carried out in evolved Romance. A language that was closely related to medieval Romanian was spoken during the Dark Ages by Vlachs in the Balkans, Herzegovina, Dalmatia (
Morlachs Morlachs ( sh-Latn-Cyrl, Morlaci, Морлаци or , ; it, Morlacchi; ro, Morlaci) has been an exonym used for a rural Christian community in Herzegovina, Lika and the Dalmatian Hinterland. The term was initially used for a bilingual Vlach ...
), Ukraine ( Hutsuls), Poland ( Gorals), Slovakia, and Czech Moravia, but gradually these communities lost their maternal language.


Recognition of the vernaculars

Between the 10th and 13th centuries, some local vernaculars developed a written form and began to supplant Latin in many of its roles. In some countries, such as
Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of th ...
, this transition was expedited by force of law; whereas in others, such as
Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
, many prominent poets and writers used the vernacular of their own accord – some of the most famous in Italy being Giacomo da Lentini and
Dante Alighieri Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His '' Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: ...
. Well before that, the vernacular was also used for practical purposes, such as the testimonies in the Placiti Cassinesi, written 960–963.


Uniformization and standardization

The invention of the printing press brought a tendency towards greater uniformity of standard languages within political boundaries, at the expense of other Romance languages and dialects less favored politically. In France, for instance, the dialect spoken in the region of Paris gradually spread to the entire country, and the Occitan of the south lost ground.


Sound changes


Consonants

Significant sound changes affected the consonants of the Romance languages.


Apocope

There was a tendency to eliminate final consonants in Vulgar Latin, either by dropping them ( apocope) or adding a vowel after them ( epenthesis). Many final consonants were rare, occurring only in certain prepositions (e.g. ''ad'' "towards", ''apud'' "at, near (a person)"), conjunctions (''sed'' "but"), demonstratives (e.g. ''illud'' "that (over there)", ''hoc'' "this"), and nominative singular noun forms, especially of neuter nouns (e.g. ''lac'' "milk", ''mel'' "honey", ''cor'' "heart"). Many of these prepositions and conjunctions were replaced by others, while the nouns were regularized into forms based on their oblique stems that avoided the final consonants (e.g. *''lacte'', *''mele'', *''core''). Final ''-m'' was dropped in Vulgar Latin. Even in Classical Latin, final ''-am'', ''-em'', ''-um'' (
inflectional suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...
es of the accusative case) were often elided in poetic meter, suggesting the ''m'' was weakly pronounced, probably marking the nasalisation of the vowel before it. This nasal vowel lost its nasalization in the Romance languages except in monosyllables, where it became e.g. Spanish ''quien'' < ''quem'' "whom", French ''rien'' "anything" < ''rem'' "thing"; note especially French and Catalan ''mon'' < ''meum'' "my (m.sg.)" which are derived from monosyllabic > *, whereas Spanish disyllabic ''mío'' and Portuguese and Catalan monosyllabic ''meu'' are derived from disyllabic > *. As a result, only the following final consonants occurred in Vulgar Latin: *Final ''-t'' in third-person singular verb forms, and ''-nt'' (later reduced in many languages to ''-n'') in third-person plural verb forms. *Final ''-s'' (including ''-x'') in a large number of morphological endings (verb endings ''-ās/-ēs/-īs/-is'', ''-mus'', ''-tis''; nominative singular ''-us/-is''; plural ''-ās/-ōs/-ēs'') and certain other words (''trēs'' "three", ''sex'' "six", ''crās'' "tomorrow", etc.). *Final ''-n'' in some monosyllables (from earlier ''-m''). *Final ''-r'', ''-d'' in some prepositions (e.g. ''ad'', ''per''), which were clitics that attached phonologically to the following word. *Very occasionally, final ''-c'', e.g. Occitan ''oc'' "yes" < ''hoc'',
Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...
''avuec'' "with" < ''apud hoc'' (although these instances were possibly protected by a final epenthetic vowel at one point). Final ''-t'' was eventually lost in many languages, although this often occurred several centuries after the Vulgar Latin period. For example, the reflex of ''-t'' was dropped in
Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...
and Old Spanish only around 1100. In Old French, this occurred only when a vowel still preceded the ''t'' (generally < Latin ''a''). Hence ''amat'' "he loves" > Old French ''aime'' but ''venit'' "he comes" > Old French ''vient'': the was never dropped and survives into Modern French in liaison, e.g. ''vient-il?'' "is he coming?" (the corresponding in ''aime-t-il?'' is analogical, not inherited). Old French also kept the third-person plural ending ''-nt'' intact. In Italo-Romance and the
Eastern Romance languages The Eastern Romance languages are a group of Romance languages. Today, the group consists of the Daco-Romance subgroup, which comprises the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian), Aromanian language and two other related minor languages, Meglen ...
, eventually all final consonants were either lost or protected by an epenthetic vowel, except for some articles and a few monosyllabic prepositions ''con'', ''per'', ''in''. Modern Standard Italian still has very few consonant-final words, although Romanian has resurfaced them through later loss of final and . For example, ''amās'' "you love" > ''ame'' > Italian ''ami''; ''amant'' "they love" > *''aman'' > Ital. ''amano''. On the evidence of "sloppily written" Lombardic language documents, however, the loss of final in northern Italy did not occur until the 7th or 8th century, after the Vulgar Latin period, and the presence of many former final consonants is betrayed by the syntactic gemination (''raddoppiamento sintattico'') that they trigger. It is also thought that after a long vowel became rather than simply disappearing: ''nōs'' > ''noi'' "we", ''se(d)ēs'' > ''sei'' "you are", ''crās'' > ''crai'' "tomorrow" (southern Italy). In unstressed syllables, the resulting diphthongs were simplified: ''canēs'' > > ''cani'' "dogs"; ''amīcās'' > > ''amiche'' "(female) friends", where nominative ''amīcae'' should produce ''**amice'' rather than ''amiche'' (note masculine ''amīcī'' > ''amici'' not ''**amichi''). Central Western Romance languages eventually regained a large number of final consonants through the general loss of final and , e.g. Catalan ''llet'' "milk" < ''lactem'', ''foc'' "fire" < ''focum'', ''peix'' "fish" < ''piscem''. In French, most of these secondary final consonants (as well as primary ones) were lost before around 1700, but tertiary final consonants later arose through the loss of < ''-a''. Hence masculine ''frīgidum'' "cold" > Old French ''freit'' > ''froid'' , feminine ''frigidam'' > Old French ''freide'' > ''froide'' .


Palatalization

Palatalization was one of the most important processes affecting consonants in Vulgar Latin. This eventually resulted in a whole series of "" and consonants in most Romance languages, e.g. Italian . The following historical stages occurred: Note how the environments become progressively less "palatal", and the languages affected become progressively fewer. The outcomes of palatalization depended on the historical stage, the consonants involved, and the languages involved. The primary division is between the Western Romance languages, with resulting from palatalization of , and the remaining languages (Italo-Dalmatian and Eastern Romance), with resulting. It is often suggested that was the original result in all languages, with > a later innovation in the Western Romance languages. Evidence of this is the fact that Italian has both and as outcomes of palatalization in different environments, while Western Romance has only . Even more suggestive is the fact that the Mozarabic language in
al-Andalus Al-Andalus translit. ; an, al-Andalus; ast, al-Ándalus; eu, al-Andalus; ber, ⴰⵏⴷⴰⵍⵓⵙ, label= Berber, translit=Andalus; ca, al-Àndalus; gl, al-Andalus; oc, Al Andalús; pt, al-Ândalus; es, al-Ándalus () was the M ...
(modern southern Spain) had as the outcome despite being in the "Western Romance" area and geographically disconnected from the remaining areas; this suggests that Mozarabic was an outlying "relic" area where the change > failed to reach. (Northern French dialects, such as Norman and Picard, also had , but this may be a secondary development, i.e. due to a later sound change > .) Note that eventually became /s, z, ʒ/ in most Western Romance languages. Thus Latin ''caelum'' (sky, heaven), pronounced with an initial , became Italian ''cielo'' , Romanian ''cer'' , Spanish ''cielo'' /, French ''ciel'' , Catalan ''cel'' , and Portuguese ''céu'' . The outcome of palatalized and is less clear: *Original has the same outcome as palatalized everywhere. *Romanian fairly consistently has < from palatalized , but from palatalized . *Italian inconsistently has from palatalized , and from palatalized . *Most other languages have the same results for palatalized and : consistent initially, but either or medially (depending on language and exact context). But Spanish has (phonetically ) initially except before , ; nearby Gascon is similar. This suggests that palatalized > > either or depending on location, while palatalized > ; after this, > in most areas, but Spanish and Gascon (originating from isolated districts behind the western Pyrenees) were relic areas unaffected by this change. In French, the outcomes of palatalized by and by were different: ''centum'' "hundred" > ''cent'' but ''cantum'' "song" > ''chant'' . French also underwent palatalization of labials before : Vulgar Latin > Old French (''sēpia'' "cuttlefish" > ''seiche'', ''rubeus'' "red" > ''rouge'', ''sīmia'' "monkey" > ''singe''). The original outcomes of palatalization must have continued to be phonetically palatalized even after they had developed into //etc. consonants. This is clear from French, where all originally palatalized consonants triggered the development of a following glide in certain circumstances (most visible in the endings ''-āre'', ''-ātum/ātam''). In some cases this came from a consonant palatalized by an adjoining consonant after the late loss of a separating vowel. For example, ''mansiōnātam'' > > > > early
Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...
''maisnieḍe'' "household". Similarly, ''mediētātem'' > > > > early
Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...
''meitieḍ'' > modern French ''moitié'' "half". In both cases, phonetic palatalization must have remained in primitive Old French at least through the time when unstressed intertonic vowels were lost (?8th century), well after the fragmentation of the Romance languages. The effect of palatalization is indicated in the writing systems of almost all Romance languages, where the letters have the "hard" pronunciation in most situations, but a "soft" pronunciation (e.g. French/Portuguese , Italian/Romanian ) before . (This orthographic trait has passed into Modern English through Norman French-speaking scribes writing
Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old Englis ...
; this replaced the earlier system of
Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th ...
, which had developed its own hard-soft distinction with the soft representing .) This has the effect of keeping the modern spelling similar to the original Latin spelling, but complicates the relationship between sound and letter. In particular, the hard sounds must be written differently before (e.g. Italian , Portuguese ), and likewise for the soft sounds when not before these letters (e.g. Italian , Portuguese ). Furthermore, in Spanish, Catalan, Occitan and Brazilian Portuguese, the use of digraphs containing to signal the hard pronunciation before means that a different spelling is also needed to signal the sounds before these vowels (Spanish , Catalan, Occitan and Brazilian Portuguese ). This produces a number of orthographic alternations in verbs whose pronunciation is entirely regular. The following are examples of corresponding first-person plural indicative and subjunctive in a number of regular Portuguese verbs: ''marcamos, marquemos'' "we mark"; ''caçamos, cacemos'' "we hunt"; ''chegamos, cheguemos'' "we arrive"; ''averiguamos, averigüemos'' "we verify"; ''adequamos, adeqüemos'' "we adapt"; ''oferecemos, ofereçamos'' "we offer"; ''dirigimos, dirijamos'' "we drive" ''erguemos, ergamos'' "we raise"; ''delinquimos, delincamos'' "we commit a crime". In the case of Italian, the convention of digraphs and to represent /k/ and /ɡ/ before written results in similar orthographic alternations, such as ''dimentico'' 'I forget', ''dimentichi'' 'you forget', ''baco'' 'worm', ''bachi'' 'worms' with or ''pago'' 'I pay', ''paghi'' 'you pay' and ''lago'' 'lake', ''laghi'' 'lakes' with The use in Italian of and to represent /tʃ/ or /dʒ/ before vowels written neatly distinguishes ''dico'' 'I say' with /k/ from ''dici'' 'you say' with /tʃ/ or ''ghiro'' 'dormouse' /ɡ/ and ''giro'' 'turn, revolution' /dʒ/, but with orthographic and also representing the sequence of /tʃ/ or /dʒ/ and the actual vowel /i/ (/ditʃi/ ''dici'', /dʒiro/ ''giro''), and no generally observed convention of indicating stress position, the status of ''i'' when followed by another vowel in spelling can be unrecognizable. For example, the written forms offer no indication that in ''camicia'' 'shirt' represents a single unstressed syllable /tʃa/ with no /i/ at any level (/kaˈmitʃa/ → aˈmiːtʃa~ aˈmiːʃa, but that underlying the same spelling in ''farmacia'' 'pharmacy' is a bisyllabic sequence consisting of the stressed syllable /tʃi/ and syllabic /a/ (/farmaˈtʃi.a/ → armaˈtʃiːa~ armaˈʃiːa.


Lenition

Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), li ...
s shifted by lenition in Vulgar Latin in some areas. The voiced labial consonants and (represented by and , respectively) both developed a
fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
as an intervocalic allophone. This is clear from the orthography; in medieval times, the spelling of a consonantal is often used for what had been a in Classical Latin, or the two spellings were used interchangeably. In many Romance languages (Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.), this fricative later developed into a ; but in others (Spanish, Galician, some Catalan and Occitan dialects, etc.) reflexes of and simply merged into a single phoneme. Several other consonants were "softened" in intervocalic position in Western Romance (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Northern Italian), but normally not phonemically in the rest of Italy (except some cases of "elegant" or Ecclesiastical words), nor apparently at all in Romanian. The dividing line between the two sets of dialects is called the La Spezia–Rimini Line and is one of the most important isoglosses of the Romance dialects. The changes (instances of diachronic lenition resulting in phonological restructuring) are as follows: Single voiceless plosives became voiced: ''-p-, -t-, -c-'' > ''-b-, -d-, -g-''. Subsequently, in some languages they were further weakened, either becoming
fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
s or approximants, (as in Spanish) or disappearing entirely (as and , but not , in French). The following example shows progressive weakening of original /t/: e.g. ''vītam'' > Italian ''vita'' , Portuguese ''vida'' (European Portuguese ), Spanish ''vida'' (Southern Peninsular Spanish ), and French ''vie'' . Some scholars have speculated that these sound changes may be due in part to the influence of
Continental Celtic languages The Continental Celtic languages are the now-extinct group of the Celtic languages that were spoken on the continent of Europe and in central Anatolia, as distinguished from the Insular Celtic languages of the British Isles and Brittany. ''Conti ...
, while scholarship of the past few decades has proposed internal motivations. *The voiced plosives and tended to disappear. *The plain sibilant ''-s-'' was also voiced to between vowels, although in many languages its spelling has not changed. (In Spanish, intervocalic was later devoiced back to ; is only found as an
allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
of before voiced consonants in Modern Spanish.) *The
double A double is a look-alike or doppelgänger; one person or being that resembles another. Double, The Double or Dubble may also refer to: Film and television * Double (filmmaking), someone who substitutes for the credited actor of a character * ...
plosives became single: ''-pp-, -tt-, -cc-, -bb-, -dd-, -gg-'' > ''-p-, -t-, -c-, -b-, -d-, -g-'' in most languages. Subsequently, in some languages the voiced forms were further weakened, either becoming fricatives or approximants, (as in Spanish). In French spelling, double consonants are merely etymological, except for -ll- after -i (pronounced j, in most cases. *The double sibilant ''-ss-'' also became phonetically single , although in many languages its spelling has not changed. Double sibilant remains in some languages of Italy, like Italian, Sardinian, and Sicilian. The sound /h/ was usually lost, except in Romanian. Some Romance languages re-developed /h/, however, notably Spanish (from /ʃ/, /ʒ/, or /ks/, and spelled as either "j" or soft "g", also syllable-final /s/) and Brazilian Portuguese (from /r/).
Consonant length In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
is no longer phonemically distinctive in most Romance languages. However some languages of Italy (Italian, Sardinian, Sicilian, and numerous other varieties of central and southern Italy) do have long consonants like , etc., where the doubling indicates either actual length or, in the case of plosives and affricates, a short hold before the consonant is released, in many cases with distinctive lexical value: e.g. ''note'' (notes) vs. ''notte'' (night), ''cade'' (s/he, it falls) vs. ''cadde'' (s/he, it fell), ''caro'' (dear, expensive) vs. ''carro'' (cart, car). They may even occur at the beginning of words in Romanesco, Neapolitan, Sicilian and other southern varieties, and are occasionally indicated in writing, e.g. Sicilian ''cchiù'' (more), and ''ccà'' (here). In general, the consonants , , and are long at the start of a word, while the archiphoneme is realised as a trill in the same position. In much of central and southern Italy, the affricates /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ weaken synchronically to fricative and between vowels, while their geminate congeners do not, e.g. ''cacio'' (cheese) vs. ''caccio'' (I chase). In Italian the geminates /ʃʃ/, /ɲɲ/, and /ʎʎ/ are pronounced as long �ʃ �ɲ and �ʎbetween vowels, but normally reduced to short following pause: ''lasciare'' 'let, leave' or ''la sciarpa'' 'the scarf' with �ʃ but post-pausal ''sciarpa'' with A few languages have regained secondary geminate consonants. The double consonants of Piedmontese exist only after stressed , written ''ë'', and are not etymological: ''vëdde'' (Latin ''vidēre'', to see), ''sëcca'' (Latin ''sicca'', dry, feminine of ''sech''). In standard Catalan and Occitan, there exists a geminate sound written ''l·l'' (Catalan) or ''ll'' (Occitan), but it is usually pronounced as a simple sound in colloquial (and even some formal) speech in both languages.


Vowel prosthesis

In
Late Latin Late Latin ( la, Latinitas serior) is the scholarly name for the form of Literary Latin of late antiquity.Roberts (1996), p. 537. English dictionary definitions of Late Latin date this period from the , and continuing into the 7th century in t ...
a prosthetic vowel /i/ (lowered to /e/ in most languages) was inserted at the beginning of any word that began with (referred to as ''s impura'') and a voiceless consonant (#sC- > isC-): *''scrībere'' 'to write' > Sardinian ''iscribere'', Spanish ''escribir'', Portuguese ''escrever'', Catalan ''escriure'', Old French ''escri(v)re'' (mod. ''écrire''); *''spatha'' "sword" > Sard ''ispada'', Sp/Pg ''espada'', Cat ''espasa'', OFr ''espeḍe'' (modern ''épée''); *''spiritus'' "spirit" > Sard ''ispìritu'', Sp ''espíritu'', Pg ''espírito'', Cat ''esperit'', French ''esprit''; *''Stephanum'' "Stephen" > Sard ''Istèvene'', Sp ''Esteban'', Cat ''Esteve'', Pg ''Estêvão'', OFr ''Estievne'' (mod. ''Étienne''); *''status'' "state" > Sard ''istadu'', Sp/Pg ''estado'', Cat ''estat'', OFr ''estat'' (mod. ''état''). While Western Romance words fused the prosthetic vowel with the word, cognates in Balkan Romance and southern Italo-Romance did not, e.g. Italian ''scrivere'', ''spada'', ''spirito'', ''Stefano'', and ''stato'', Romanian ''scrie'', ''spată'', ''spirit'', ''Ștefan'' and ''statut//stare''. In Italian, syllabification rules were preserved instead by vowel-final articles, thus feminine ''spada'' as ''la spada'', but instead of rendering the masculine ''*il spaghetto'', ''lo spaghetto'' came to be the norm. Though receding at present, Italian once had a prosthetic maintaining /s/ syllable-final if a consonant preceded such clusters, so that 'in Switzerland' was ''in'' ''Svizzera''. Some speakers still use the prothetic productively, and it is fossilized in a few set locutions such as ''in ispecie'' 'especially' or ''per iscritto'' 'in writing' (a form whose survival may have been buttressed in part by the word ''iscritto'' < Latin ''īnscrīptus''); this is because in Italian, a syllable-final position cannot be more than 1 consonant in all native words. The association of /i/ ~ /j/ and /s/ also led to the vocalization of word-final -''s'' in Italian, Romanian, certain Occitan dialects, and the Spanish dialect of Chocó in Colombia.


Stressed vowels


Loss of vowel length, reorientation

One profound change that affected Vulgar Latin was the reorganisation of its
vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
system. Classical Latin had five short vowels, ''ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ'', and five long vowels, ''ā, ē, ī, ō, ū'', each of which was an individual
phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
(see the table in the right, for their likely pronunciation in IPA), and four diphthongs, ''ae'', ''oe'', ''au'' and ''eu'' (five according to some authors, including ''ui''). There were also long and short versions of ''y'', representing the rounded vowel in Greek borrowings, which however probably came to be pronounced even before Romance vowel changes started. There is evidence that in the imperial period all the short vowels except ''a'' differed by quality as well as by length from their long counterparts. So, for example ''ē'' was pronounced
close-mid A close-mid vowel (also mid-close vowel, high-mid vowel, mid-high vowel or half-close vowel) is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned one ...
while ''ĕ'' was pronounced
open-mid An open-mid vowel (also mid-open vowel, low-mid vowel, mid-low vowel or half-open vowel) is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned one thi ...
, and ''ī'' was pronounced close while ''ĭ'' was pronounced near-close . During the Proto-Romance period, phonemic length distinctions were lost. Vowels came to be automatically pronounced long in stressed,
open syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...
s (i.e. when followed by only one consonant), and pronounced short everywhere else. This situation is still maintained in modern Italian: ''cade'' "he falls" vs. ''cadde'' "he fell". The Proto-Romance loss of phonemic length originally produced a system with nine different quality distinctions in monophthongs, where only original had merged. Soon, however, many of these vowels coalesced: *The simplest outcome was in Sardinian, where the former long and short vowels in Latin simply coalesced, e.g. > , > : This produced a simple five-vowel system . *In most areas, however (technically, the
Italo-Western languages Italo-Western is, in some classifications, the largest branch of the Romance languages. It comprises two of the branches of Romance languages: Italo-Dalmatian and Western Romance. It excludes the Sardinian language and Eastern Romance. Italo-Dal ...
), the near-close vowels lowered and merged into the high-mid vowels . As a result, Latin ''pira'' "pear" and ''vēra'' "true", came to rhyme (e.g. Italian and Spanish ''pera, vera'', and
Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...
''poire, voire''). Similarly, Latin ''nucem'' (from ''nux'' "nut") and ''vōcem'' (from ''vōx'' "voice") become Italian ''noce, voce'', Portuguese ''noz, voz'', and French ''noix, voix''. This produced a seven-vowel system , still maintained in conservative languages such as Italian and Portuguese, and lightly transformed in Spanish (where ). *In the
Eastern Romance languages The Eastern Romance languages are a group of Romance languages. Today, the group consists of the Daco-Romance subgroup, which comprises the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian), Aromanian language and two other related minor languages, Meglen ...
(particularly,
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania ** Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
), the front vowels evolved as in the majority of languages, but the back vowels evolved as in Sardinian. This produced an unbalanced six-vowel system: . In modern Romanian, this system has been significantly transformed, with and with new vowels evolving, leading to a balanced seven-vowel system with central as well as front and back vowels: . * Sicilian is sometimes described as having its own distinct vowel system. In fact, Sicilian passed through the same developments as the main bulk of Italo-Western languages. Subsequently, however, high-mid vowels (but not low-mid vowels) were raised in all syllables, stressed and unstressed; i.e. . The result is a five-vowel . Further variants are found in southern Italy and Corsica, which also boasts a completely distinct system (see above). The Proto-Romance allophonic vowel-length system was rephonemicized in the Gallo-Romance languages as a result of the loss of many final vowels. Some northern Italian languages (e.g. Friulian) still maintain this secondary phonemic length, but most languages dropped it by either diphthongizing or shortening the new long vowels. French phonemicized a third vowel length system around AD 1300 as a result of the sound change /VsC/ > /VhC/ > (where ''V'' is any vowel and ''C'' any consonant). This vowel length began to be lost in Early Modern French, but the long vowels are still usually marked with a circumflex (and continue to be distinguished regionally, chiefly in Belgium). A fourth vowel length system, still non-phonemic, has now arisen: All nasal vowels as well as the oral vowels (which mostly derive from former long vowels) are pronounced long in all stressed
closed syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological ...
s, and all vowels are pronounced long in syllables closed by the voiced fricatives . This system in turn has been phonemicized in some non-standard dialects (e.g. Haitian Creole), as a result of the loss of final .


Latin diphthongs

The Latin diphthongs ''ae'' and ''oe'', pronounced and in earlier Latin, were early on monophthongized. ''ae'' became by the 1st century at the latest. Although this sound was still distinct from all existing vowels, the neutralization of Latin vowel length eventually caused its merger with < short ''e'': e.g. ''caelum'' "sky" > French ''ciel'', Spanish/Italian ''cielo'', Portuguese ''céu'' , with the same vowel as in ''mele'' "honey" > French/Spanish ''miel'', Italian ''miele'', Portuguese ''mel'' . Some words show an early merger of ''ae'' with , as in ''praeda'' "booty" > *''prēda'' > French ''proie'' (vs. expected **''priée''), Italian ''preda'' (not **''prieda'') "prey"; or ''faenum'' "hay" > *''fēnum'' > Spanish ''heno'', French ''foin'' (but Italian ''fieno'' /fjɛno/). ''oe'' generally merged with : ''poenam'' "punishment" > Romance * > Spanish/Italian ''pena'', French ''peine''; ''foedus'' "ugly" > Romance * > Spanish ''feo'', Portuguese ''feio''. There are relatively few such outcomes, since ''oe'' was rare in Classical Latin (most original instances had become Classical ''ū'', as in Old Latin ''oinos'' "one" > Classical ''ūnus''Palmer (1954).) and so ''oe'' was mostly limited to Greek loanwords, which were typically learned (high-register) terms. ''au'' merged with ''ō'' in the popular speech of Rome already by the 1st century . A number of authors remarked on this explicitly, e.g. Cicero's taunt that the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher had changed his name from ''Claudius'' to ingratiate himself with the masses. This change never penetrated far from Rome, however, and the pronunciation /au/ was maintained for centuries in the vast majority of Latin-speaking areas, although it eventually developed into some variety of ''o'' in many languages. For example, Italian and French have as the usual reflex, but this post-dates diphthongization of and the French-specific palatalization > (hence ''causa'' > French ''chose'', Italian ''cosa'' not **''cuosa''). Spanish has , but Portuguese spelling maintains , which has developed to (and still remains as in some dialects, and in others). Occitan, Romanian, southern Italian languages, and many other minority Romance languages still have . A few common words, however, show an early merger with ''ō'' , evidently reflecting a generalization of the popular Roman pronunciation: e.g. French ''queue'', Italian ''coda'' , Occitan ''co(d)a'', Romanian ''coadă'' (all meaning "tail") must all derive from ''cōda'' rather than Classical ''cauda'' (but notice Portuguese ''cauda''). Similarly, Spanish ''oreja'', Portuguese ''orelha'', French ''oreille'', Romanian ''ureche'', and Sardinian ''olícra'', ''orícla'' "ear" must derive from ''ōric(u)la'' rather than Classical ''auris'' (Occitan ''aurelha'' was probably influenced by the unrelated ''ausir'' < ''audīre'' "to hear"), and the form ''oricla'' is in fact reflected in the
Appendix Probi The ''Appendix Probi'' ("Probus' Appendix") is the conventional name for a series of five documents believed to have been copied in the seventh or eighth century in Bobbio, Italy. Its name derives from the fact that the documents were found atta ...
.


Further developments


= Metaphony

= An early process that operated in all Romance languages to varying degrees was metaphony (vowel mutation), conceptually similar to the umlaut process so characteristic of the
Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...
. Depending on the language, certain stressed vowels were raised (or sometimes diphthongized) either by a final /i/ or /u/ or by a directly following /j/. Metaphony is most extensive in the Italo-Romance languages, and applies to nearly all languages in Italy; however, it is absent from Tuscan, and hence from standard Italian. In many languages affected by metaphony, a distinction exists between final /u/ (from most cases of Latin ''-um'') and final /o/ (from Latin ''-ō'', ''-ud'' and some cases of ''-um'', esp. masculine "mass" nouns), and only the former triggers metaphony. Some examples: *In Servigliano in the Marche of Italy, stressed are raised to before final /i/ or /u/: "I put" vs. "you put" (< *metti < *mettes < Latin ''mittis''); "modest (fem.)" vs. "modest (masc.)"; "this (neut.)" (< Latin ''eccum istud'') vs. "this (masc.)" (< Latin ''eccum istum''). *Calvallo in Basilicata, southern Italy, is similar, but the low-mid vowels are diphthongized to rather than raised: "he puts" vs. "you put", but "I think" vs. "you think". *Metaphony also occurs in most northern Italian dialects, but only by (usually lost) final *i; apparently, final *u was lowered to *o (usually lost) before metaphony could take effect. *Some of the Astur-Leonese languages in northern Spain have the same distinction between final /o/ and /u/ as in the Central-Southern Italian languages, with /u/ triggering metaphony.Álvaro Arias.
La armonización vocálica en fonología funcional (de lo sintagmático en fonología a propósito de dos casos de metafonía hispánica)
", ''Moenia'' 11 (2006): 111–139.
The plural of masculine nouns in these dialects ends in ''-os'', which does not trigger metaphony, unlike in the singular (vs. Italian plural ''-i'', which does trigger metaphony). *Sardinian has allophonic raising of mid vowels to before final /i/ or /u/. This has been phonemicized in the Campidanese dialect as a result of the raising of final /e o/ to /i u/. *Raising of to occurs sporadically in Portuguese in the masculine singular, e.g. ''porco'' "pig" vs. ''porcos'' "pig". It is thought that Galician-Portuguese at one point had singular /u/ vs. plural /os/, exactly as in modern Astur-Leonese. *In all of the Western Romance languages, final /i/ (primarily occurring in the first-person singular of the preterite) raised mid-high to , e.g. Portuguese ''fiz'' "I did" (< *fidzi < *fedzi < Latin ''fēcī'') vs. ''fez'' "he did" (< *fedze < Latin ''fēcit''). Old Spanish similarly had ''fize'' "I did" vs. ''fezo'' "he did" (''-o'' by analogy with ''amó'' "he loved"), but subsequently generalized stressed /i/, producing modern ''hice'' "I did" vs. ''hizo'' "he did". The same thing happened prehistorically in Old French, yielding ''fis'' "I did", ''fist'' "he did" (< *feist < Latin ''fēcit'').


= Diphthongization

= A number of languages diphthongized some of the free vowels, especially the open-mid vowels : *Spanish consistently diphthongized all open-mid vowels except for before certain palatal consonants (which raised the vowels to close-mid before diphthongization took place). *Romanian similarly diphthongized to (the corresponding vowel did not develop from Proto-Romance). *Italian diphthongized and in open syllables (in the situations where vowels were lengthened in Proto-Romance), the most salient exception being /ˈbɛne/ ''bene'' 'well', perhaps due to the high frequency of apocopated ''ben'' (e.g. ''ben difficile'' 'quite difficult', ''ben fatto'' 'well made' etc.). *French similarly diphthongized in open syllables (when lengthened), along with : > > middle OF > modern . *French also diphthongized before palatalized consonants, especially /j/. Further development was as follows: ; > /uoj/ > early OF /uj/ > modern /ɥi/. *Catalan diphthongized before /j/ from palatalized consonants, just like French, with similar results: , . These diphthongizations had the effect of reducing or eliminating the distinctions between open-mid and close-mid vowels in many languages. In Spanish and Romanian, all open-mid vowels were diphthongized, and the distinction disappeared entirely. Portuguese is the most conservative in this respect, keeping the seven-vowel system more or less unchanged (but with changes in particular circumstances, e.g. due to metaphony). Other than before palatalized consonants, Catalan keeps intact, but split in a complex fashion into and then coalesced again in the standard dialect (
Eastern Catalan The Catalan dialects feature a relative uniformity, especially when compared to other Romance languages; both in terms of vocabulary, semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology. Mutual intelligibility between its dialects is very high, esti ...
) in such a way that most original have reversed their quality to become . In French and Italian, the distinction between open-mid and close-mid vowels occurred only in closed syllables. Standard Italian more or less maintains this. In French, /e/ and merged by the twelfth century or so, and the distinction between and was eliminated without merging by the sound changes , . Generally this led to a situation where both and occur allophonically, with the close-mid vowels in
open syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...
s and the open-mid vowels in
closed syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological ...
s. In French, both and were partly rephonemicized: Both and occur in open syllables as a result of , and both and occur in closed syllables as a result of . Old French also had numerous falling diphthongs resulting from diphthongization before palatal consonants or from a fronted /j/ originally following palatal consonants in Proto-Romance or later: e.g. ''pācem'' /patsʲe/ "peace" > PWR */padzʲe/ (lenition) > OF ''paiz'' /pajts/; *''punctum'' "point" > Gallo-Romance */ponʲto/ > */pojɲto/ (fronting) > OF ''point'' /põjnt/. During the Old French period, preconsonantal /l/ vocalized to /w/, producing many new falling diphthongs: e.g. ''dulcem'' "sweet" > PWR */doltsʲe/ > OF ''dolz'' /duɫts/ > ''douz'' /duts/; ''fallet'' "fails, is deficient" > OF ''falt'' > ''faut'' "is needed"; ''bellus'' "beautiful" > OF ''bels'' > ''beaus'' . By the end of the Middle French period, ''all'' falling diphthongs either monophthongized or switched to rising diphthongs: proto-OF > early OF > modern spelling > mod. French .


= Nasalization

= In both French and Portuguese, nasal vowels eventually developed from sequences of a vowel followed by a nasal consonant (/m/ or /n/). Originally, all vowels in both languages were nasalized before any nasal consonants, and nasal consonants not immediately followed by a vowel were eventually dropped. In French, nasal vowels before remaining nasal consonants were subsequently denasalized, but not before causing the vowels to lower somewhat, e.g. ''dōnat'' "he gives" > OF ''dune'' > ''donne'' , ''fēminam'' > ''femme'' . Other vowels remained nasalized, and were dramatically lowered: ''fīnem'' "end" > ''fin'' (often pronounced ); ''linguam'' "tongue" > ''langue'' ; ''ūnum'' "one" > ''un'' . In Portuguese, /n/ between vowels was dropped, and the resulting
hiatus Hiatus may refer to: * Hiatus (anatomy), a natural fissure in a structure * Hiatus (stratigraphy), a discontinuity in the age of strata in stratigraphy *''Hiatus'', a genus of picture-winged flies with sole member species '' Hiatus fulvipes'' * G ...
eliminated through vowel contraction of various sorts, often producing diphthongs: ''manum, *manōs'' > PWR *''manu, ˈmanos'' "hand(s)" > ''mão, mãos'' ; ''canem, canēs'' "dog(s)" > PWR *''kane, ˈkanes'' > *''can, ˈcanes'' > ''cão, cães'' ; ''ratiōnem, ratiōnēs'' "reason(s)" > PWR *''raˈdʲzʲone, raˈdʲzʲones'' > *''raˈdzon, raˈdzones'' > ''razão, razões'' (Brazil), (Portugal). Sometimes the nasalization was eliminated: ''lūna'' "moon" > Galician-Portuguese ''lũa'' > ''lua''; ''vēna'' "vein" > Galician-Portuguese ''vẽa'' > ''veia''. Nasal vowels that remained actually tend to be raised (rather than lowered, as in French): ''fīnem'' "end" > ''fim'' ; ''centum'' "hundred" > PWR ''tʲsʲɛnto'' > ''cento'' ; ''pontem'' "bridge" > PWR ''pɔnte'' > ''ponte'' (Brazil), (Portugal).


Front-rounded vowels

Characteristic of the
Gallo-Romance The Gallo-Romance branch of the Romance languages includes in the narrowest sense the Langues d'oïl and Franco-Provençal. However, other definitions are far broader, variously encompassing the Occitano-Romance, Gallo-Italic, and Rhaeto-Rom ...
and Rhaeto-Romance languages are the front rounded vowels . All of these languages show an unconditional change /u/ > /y/, e.g. ''lūnam'' > French ''lune'' , Occitan . Many of the languages in Switzerland and Italy show the further change /y/ > /i/. Also very common is some variation of the French development (lengthened in
open syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...
s) > > , with mid back vowels diphthongizing in some circumstances and then re-monophthongizing into mid-front rounded vowels. (French has both and , with developing from in certain circumstances.)


Unstressed vowels

There was more variability in the result of the unstressed vowels. Originally in Proto-Romance, the same nine vowels developed in unstressed as stressed syllables, and in Sardinian, they coalesced into the same five vowels in the same way. In Italo-Western Romance, however, vowels in unstressed syllables were significantly different from stressed vowels, with yet a third outcome for final unstressed syllables. In non-final unstressed syllables, the seven-vowel system of stressed syllables developed, but then the low-mid vowels merged into the high-mid vowels . This system is still preserved, largely or completely, in all of the conservative Romance languages (e.g. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan). In final unstressed syllables, results were somewhat complex. One of the more difficult issues is the development of final short ''-u'', which appears to have been raised to rather than lowered to , as happened in all other syllables. However, it is possible that in reality, final comes from ''long'' *''-ū'' < ''-um'', where original final ''-m'' caused vowel lengthening as well as nasalization. Evidence of this comes from Rhaeto-Romance, in particular Sursilvan, which preserves reflexes of both final ''-us'' and ''-um'', and where the latter, but not the former, triggers metaphony. This suggests the development ''-us'' > > , but ''-um'' > > . The original five-vowel system in final unstressed syllables was preserved as-is in some of the more conservative central Italian languages, but in most languages there was further coalescence: *In Tuscan (including standard Italian), final /u/ merged into /o/. *In the Western Romance languages, final /i/ eventually merged into /e/ (although final /i/ triggered metaphony before that, e.g. Spanish ''hice'', Portuguese ''fiz'' "I did" < ''*fize'' < Latin ''fēcī''). Conservative languages like Spanish largely maintain that system, but drop final /e/ after certain single consonants, e.g. /r/, /l/, /n/, /d/, /z/ (< palatalized ''c''). The same situation happened in final /u/ that merged into /o/ in Spanish. *In the Gallo-Romance languages (part of Western Romance), final /o/ and /e/ were dropped entirely unless that produced an impossible final cluster (e.g. /tr/), in which case a "prop vowel" /e/ was added. This left only two final vowels: /a/ and prop vowel /e/. Catalan preserves this system. *Loss of final stressless vowels in
Venetian Venetian often means from or related to: * Venice, a city in Italy * Veneto, a region of Italy * Republic of Venice (697–1797), a historical nation in that area Venetian and the like may also refer to: * Venetian language, a Romance language s ...
shows a pattern intermediate between Central Italian and the Gallo-Italic branch, and the environments for vowel deletion vary considerably depending on the dialect. In the table above, final /e/ is uniformly absent in ''mar'', absent in some dialects in ''part(e)'' /part(e)/ and ''set(e)'' /sɛt(e)/, but retained in ''mare'' (< Latin ''mātrem'') as a relic of the earlier cluster *dr. *In primitive
Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...
(one of the Gallo-Romance languages), these two remaining vowels merged into . Various later changes happened in individual languages, e.g.: *In French, most final consonants were dropped, and then final was also dropped. The is still preserved in spelling as a final silent ''-e'', whose main purpose is to signal that the previous consonant is pronounced, e.g. ''port'' "port" vs. ''porte'' "door" . These changes also eliminated the difference between singular and plural in most words: ''ports'' "ports" (still ), ''portes'' "doors" (still ). Final consonants reappear in liaison contexts (in close connection with a following vowel-initial word), e.g. ''nous'' "we" vs. ''nous avons'' "we have", ''il fait'' "he does" vs. ''fait-il ?'' "does he?". *In Portuguese, final unstressed /o/ and /u/ were apparently preserved intact for a while, since final unstressed /u/, but not /o/ or /os/, triggered metaphony (see above). Final-syllable unstressed /o/ was raised in preliterary times to /u/, but always still written . At some point (perhaps in late Galician-Portuguese), final-syllable unstressed /e/ was raised to /i/ (but still written ); this remains in Brazilian Portuguese, but has developed to in northern and central European Portuguese. *In Catalan, final unstressed > . In many dialects, unstressed and merge into as in Portuguese, and unstressed and merge into . However, some dialects preserve the original five-vowel system, most notably standard Valencian.


Intertonic vowels

The so-called ''intertonic vowels'' are word-internal unstressed vowels, i.e. not in the initial, final, or ''tonic'' (i.e. stressed) syllable, hence intertonic. Intertonic vowels were the most subject to loss or modification. Already in Vulgar Latin intertonic vowels between a single consonant and a following /r/ or /l/ tended to drop: ''vétulum'' "old" > ''veclum'' > Dalmatian ''vieklo'', Sicilian ''vecchiu'', Portuguese ''velho''. But many languages ultimately dropped almost all intertonic vowels. Generally, those languages south and east of the La Spezia–Rimini Line (Romanian and Central-Southern Italian) maintained intertonic vowels, while those to the north and west (Western Romance) dropped all except /a/. Standard Italian generally maintained intertonic vowels, but typically raised unstressed /e/ > /i/. Examples: *''septimā́nam'' "week" > Italian ''settimana'', Romanian ''săptămână'' vs. Spanish/Portuguese ''semana'', French ''semaine'', Occitan/Catalan ''setmana'', Piedmontese ''sman-a'' *''quattuórdecim'' "fourteen" > Italian ''quattordici'', Venetian ''cuatòrdexe'', Lombard/Piedmontese ''quatòrdes'', vs. Spanish ''catorce'', Portuguese/French ''quatorze'' *''metipsissimus'' > ''medipsimus'' /medíssimos/ ~ /medéssimos/ "self" > Italian ''medésimo'' vs. Venetian ''medemo'', Lombard ''medemm'', Old Spanish ''meísmo'', ''meesmo'' (> modern ''mismo''), Galician-Portuguese ''meesmo'' (> modern ''mesmo''), Old French ''meḍisme'' (> later ''meïsme'' > MF ''mesme'' > modern ''même'') *''bonitā́tem'' "goodness" > Italian ''bonità'' ~ ''bontà'', Romanian ''bunătate'' but Spanish ''bondad'', Portuguese ''bondade'', French ''bonté'' *''collocā́re'' "to position, arrange" > Italian ''coricare'' vs. Spanish ''colgar'' "to hang", Romanian ''culca'' "to lie down", French ''coucher'' "to lay sth on its side; put s.o. to bed" *''commūnicā́re'' "to take communion" > Romanian ''cumineca'' vs. Portuguese ''comungar'', Spanish ''comulgar'', Old French ''comungier'' *''carricā́re'' "to load (onto a wagon, cart)" > Portuguese/Catalan ''carregar'' vs. Spanish/Occitan ''cargar'' "to load", French ''charger'', Lombard ''cargà/caregà'', Venetian ''carigar/cargar(e)'' "to load", Romanian ''încărca'' *''fábricam'' "forge" > > Spanish ''fragua'', Portuguese ''frágua'', Occitan/Catalan ''farga'', French ''forge'' *''disjējūnā́re'' "to break a fast" > *''disjūnā́re'' > Old French ''disner'' "to have lunch" > French ''dîner'' "to dine" (but *''disjū́nat'' > Old French ''desjune'' "he has lunch" > French ''(il) déjeune'' "he has lunch") *''adjūtā́re'' "to help" > Italian ''aiutare'', Romanian ''ajuta'' but French ''aider'', Lombard ''aidà/aiuttà'' (Spanish ''ayudar'', Portuguese ''ajudar'' based on stressed forms, e.g. ''ayuda/ajuda'' "he helps"; cf. Old French ''aidier'' "to help" vs. ''aiue'' "he helps") Portuguese is more conservative in maintaining some intertonic vowels other than /a/: e.g. *''offerḗscere'' "to offer" > Portuguese ''oferecer'' vs. Spanish ''ofrecer'', French ''offrir'' (< *''offerīre''). French, on the other hand, drops even intertonic /a/ after the stress: ''Stéphanum'' "Stephen" > Spanish ''Esteban'' but Old French ''Estievne'' > French ''Étienne''. Many cases of /a/ before the stress also ultimately dropped in French: ''sacraméntum'' "sacrament" > Old French ''sairement'' > French ''serment'' "oath".


Writing systems

The Romance languages for the most part have kept the writing system of Latin, adapting it to their evolution. One exception was Romanian before the nineteenth century, where, after the Roman retreat, literacy was reintroduced through the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, a Slavic influence. A Cyrillic alphabet was also used for Romanian (then called Moldovan) in the
USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nati ...
. The non-Christian populations of Spain also used the scripts of their religions (
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
and Hebrew) to write Romance languages such as Ladino and Mozarabic in ''
aljamiado ''Aljamiado'' (; ; ar, عَجَمِيَة trans. ''ʿajamiyah'' ) or ''Aljamía'' texts are manuscripts that use the Arabic script for transcribing European languages, especially Romance languages such as Mozarabic, Aragonese, Portuguese, S ...
''.


Letters

The Romance languages are written with the
classical Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...
of 23 letters – ''A'', ''B'', ''C'', ''D'', ''E'', ''F'', ''G'', ''H'', ''I'', ''K'', ''L'', ''M'', ''N'', ''O'', ''P'', ''Q'', ''R'', ''S'', ''T'', ''V'', ''X'', ''Y'', ''Z'' – subsequently modified and augmented in various ways. In particular, the single Latin letter ''V'' split into ''V'' (consonant) and ''U'' (vowel), and the letter ''I'' split into ''I'' and ''J''. The Latin letter ''K'' and the new letter ''W'', which came to be widely used in Germanic languages, are seldom used in most Romance languages – mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words. Indeed, in Italian prose is properly . Portuguese and Catalan eschew importation of "foreign" letters more than most languages. Thus Wikipedia is in Catalan but in Spanish; chikungunya, sandwich, kiwi are , , in Portuguese but , , in Spanish. While most of the 23 basic Latin letters have maintained their phonetic value, for some of them it has diverged considerably; and the new letters added since the Middle Ages have been put to different uses in different scripts. Some letters, notably ''H'' and ''Q'', have been variously combined in digraphs or trigraphs (see below) to represent phonetic phenomena that could not be recorded with the basic Latin alphabet, or to get around previously established spelling conventions. Most languages added auxiliary marks (
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s) to some letters, for these and other purposes. The spelling rules of most Romance languages are fairly simple, and consistent within any language. Since the spelling systems are based on phonemic structures rather than phonetics, however, the actual pronunciation of what is represented in standard orthography can be subject to considerable regional variation, as well as to allophonic differentiation by position in the word or utterance. Among the letters representing the most conspicuous phonological variations, between Romance languages or with respect to Latin, are the following: :B, V: Merged in Spanish and some dialects of Catalan, where both letters represent a single phoneme pronounced as either or depending on position, with no differentiation between B and V. :C: Generally a "hard" , but "soft" (
fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
or affricate) before ''e'', ''i'', or ''y''. :G: Generally a "hard" , but "soft" (fricative or affricate) before ''e'', ''i'', or ''y''. In some languages, like Spanish, the hard ''g'', phonemically , is pronounced as a fricative after vowels. In Romansch, the soft ''g'' is a voiced palatal plosive or a voiced alveolo-palatal affricate . :H: Silent in most languages; used to form various digraphs. But represents in Romanian, Walloon and Gascon Occitan. :J: Represents the fricative in most languages, or the palatal approximant in Romansh and in several of the languages of Italy, and or in Spanish, depending on the variety. Italian does not use this letter in native words. :Q: As in Latin, its phonetic value is that of a hard ''c'', i.e. , and in native words it is almost always followed by a (sometimes silent) ''u''. Romanian does not use this letter in native words. :S: Generally voiceless , but voiced between vowels in some languages. In Spanish, Romanian, Galician and several varieties of Italian, however, it is always pronounced voiceless between vowels. If the phoneme /s/ is represented by the letter S, predictable assimilations are normally not shown (e.g. Italian 'sled', spelled ''slitta'' but pronounced , never with ). Also at the end of syllables it may represent special
allophonic In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ' ...
pronunciations. In Romansh, it also stands for a voiceless or voiced fricative, or , before certain consonants. :W: No Romance language uses this letter in native words, with the exception of Walloon. :X: Its pronunciation is rather variable, both between and within languages. In the Middle Ages, the languages of Iberia used this letter to denote the voiceless postalveolar fricative , which is still the case in modern
Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
and Portuguese. With the Renaissance the classical pronunciation – or similar
consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...
s, such as , , or – were frequently reintroduced in latinisms and hellenisms. In
Venetian Venetian often means from or related to: * Venice, a city in Italy * Veneto, a region of Italy * Republic of Venice (697–1797), a historical nation in that area Venetian and the like may also refer to: * Venetian language, a Romance language s ...
it represents , and in Ligurian the voiced postalveolar fricative . Italian does not use this letter in native words. :Y: This letter is not used in most languages, with the prominent exceptions of French and Spanish, where it represents before vowels (or various similar fricatives such as the palatal fricative , in Spanish), and the vowel or semivowel elsewhere. :Z: In most languages it represents the sound . However, in Italian it denotes the affricates and (which are two separate phonemes, but rarely contrast; among the few examples of minimal pairs are "ray" with , "race" with (note that both are phonetically long between vowels); in Romansh the voiceless affricate ; and in Galician and Spanish it denotes either the voiceless dental fricative or . Otherwise, letters that are not combined as digraphs generally represent the same phonemes as suggested by the
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
(IPA), whose design was, in fact, greatly influenced by Romance spelling systems.


Digraphs and trigraphs

Since most Romance languages have more sounds than can be accommodated in the Roman Latin alphabet they all resort to the use of digraphs and trigraphs – combinations of two or three letters with a single phonemic value. The concept (but not the actual combinations) is derived from Classical Latin, which used, for example, ''TH'', ''PH'', and ''CH'' when transliterating the Greek letters "θ", "ϕ" (later "φ"), and "χ". These were once aspirated sounds in Greek before changing to corresponding fricatives, and the ''H'' represented what sounded to the Romans like an following , , and respectively. Some of the digraphs used in modern scripts are: :CI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican and Romanian to represent before ''A'', ''O'', or ''U''. :CH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican, Romanian, Romansh and Sardinian to represent before ''E'' or ''I'' (including yod ); in Occitan, Spanish, Astur-leonese and Galician; or in Romansh before ''A'', ''O'' or ''U''; and in most other languages. In Catalan it is used in some old spelling conventions for . :DD: used in Sicilian and Sardinian to represent the
voiced retroflex plosive The voiced retroflex plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is d`. Like all the retroflex ...
. In recent history more accurately transcribed as ''DDH''. :DJ: used in Walloon and Catalan for . :GI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican and Romanian to represent before ''A'', ''O'', or ''U'', and in Romansh to represent or or (before ''A'', ''E'', ''O'', and ''U'') or :GH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican, Romanian, Romansh and Sardinian to represent before ''E'' or ''I'' (including yod ), and in Galician for the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (not standard sound). :GL: used in Romansh before consonants and ''I'' and at the end of words for . :GLI: used in Italian and Corsican for and Romansh for . :GN: used in French, some Romance languages in Italy, Corsican, Romansh Walloon for , as in ''champignon''; in Italian to represent , as in "ogni" or "lo gnocco". :GU: used before ''E'' or ''I'' to represent or in all Romance languages except Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican, Romansh, and Romanian, which use GH instead. :IG: used at the end of word in Catalan for , as in ''maig'', ''safareig'' or ''enmig''. :IX: used between vowels or at the end of word in Catalan for , as in ''caixa'' or ''calaix''. :JH: used in Walloon for /ʒ/ or /h/. :LH: used in Portuguese and Occitan . :LL: used in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Astur-leonese, Norman and Dgèrnésiais, originally for which has merged in some cases with . Represents in French unless it follows ''I'' (''i'') when it represents (or in some dialects). As in Italian, it is used in Occitan for a
long Long may refer to: Measurement * Long, characteristic of something of great duration * Long, characteristic of something of great length * Longitude (abbreviation: long.), a geographic coordinate * Longa (music), note value in early music mensu ...
. :L·L: used in Catalan for a geminate consonant . :NH: used in Portuguese and Occitan for , used in official Galician for . :N-: used in Piedmontese and Ligurian for between two vowels. :NN: used in Leonese for , in Italian for geminate . :NY: used in Catalan and Walloon for . :QU: represents in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, and Romansh; in French, Astur-leonese (normally before ''e'' or ''i''); (before ''e'' or ''i'') or (normally before ''a'' or ''o'') in Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese; in Spanish (always before ''e'' or ''i''). :RR: used between vowels in several languages (Occitan, Catalan, Spanish) to denote a trilled or a guttural R, instead of the flap . :SC: used before ''E'' or ''I'' in Italian, Romance languages in Italy as , in European Portuguese as and in French, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan and Latin American Spanish as in words of certain etymology (notice this would represent in standard peninsular Spanish) :SCH: used in Romansh for or , in Italian for before ''E'' or ''I'', including yod . :SCI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, and Corsican to represent before ''A'', ''O'', or ''U''. :SH: used in Aranese Occitan and Walloon for . :SS: used in French, Portuguese, Piedmontese, Romansh, Occitan, and Catalan for between vowels, in Italian, Romance languages of Italy, and Corsican for long . :TS: used in Catalan for . :TSH: used in Walloon for /tʃ/. :TG: used in Romansh for or . In Catalan is used for before ''E'' and ''I'', as in ''metge'' or ''fetge''. :TH: used in Jèrriais for ; used in Aranese for either or . :TJ: used between vowels and before ''A'', ''O'' or ''U'', in Catalan for , as in ''sotjar'' or ''mitjó''. :TSCH: used in Romansh for . :TX: used at the beginning or at the end of word or between vowels in Catalan for , as in ''txec'', ''esquitx'' or ''atxa''. :TZ: used in Catalan for . :XH: used in Walloon for /ʃ/ or /h/, depending on the dialect. While the digraphs ''CH'', ''PH'', ''RH'' and ''TH'' were at one time used in many words of Greek origin, most languages have now replaced them with ''C/QU'', ''F'', ''R'' and ''T''. Only French has kept these etymological spellings, which now represent or , , and , respectively.


Double consonants

Gemination In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
, in the languages where it occurs, is usually indicated by doubling the consonant, except when it does not contrast phonemically with the corresponding short consonant, in which case gemination is not indicated. In Jèrriais, long consonants are marked with an apostrophe: is a long , is a long , and is a long . The phonemic contrast between geminate and single consonants is widespread in Italian, and normally indicated in the traditional orthography: 'done' vs. 'fate, destiny'; 's/he, it fell' vs. 's/he, it falls'. The double consonants in French orthography, however, are merely etymological. In Catalan, the gemination of is marked by a ("flying point"): .


Diacritics

Romance languages also introduced various marks (
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s) that may be attached to some letters, for various purposes. In some cases, diacritics are used as an alternative to digraphs and trigraphs; namely to represent a larger number of sounds than would be possible with the basic alphabet, or to distinguish between sounds that were previously written the same. Diacritics are also used to mark word stress, to indicate exceptional pronunciation of letters in certain words, and to distinguish words with same pronunciation (
homophone A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (pa ...
s). Depending on the language, some letter-diacritic combinations may be considered distinct letters, e.g. for the purposes of lexical sorting. This is the case, for example, of Romanian ''ș'' () and Spanish ''ñ'' (). The following are the most common use of diacritics in Romance languages. *Vowel quality: the system of marking close-mid vowels with an acute accent, ''é'', and open-mid vowels with a grave accent, ''è'', is widely used (e.g. Catalan, French, Italian). Portuguese, however, uses the circumflex (''ê'') for the former, and the acute (''é''), for the latter. Some minority Romance languages use an umlaut (diaeresis mark) in the case of ''ä, ö, ü'' to indicate fronted vowel variants, as in
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...
. Centralized vowels () are indicated variously (''â'' in Portuguese, ''ă/î'' in Romanian, ''ë'' in Piedmontese, etc.). In French, Occitan and Romanian, these accents are used whenever necessary to distinguish the appropriate vowel quality, but in the other languages, they are used only when it is necessary to mark unpredictable stress, or in some cases to distinguish homophones. *Vowel length: French uses a circumflex to indicate what had been a long vowel (although nowadays this rather indicates a difference in vowel quality, if it has any effect at all on pronunciation). This same usage is found in some minority languages. *Nasality: Portuguese marks nasal vowels with a tilde (''ã'') when they occur before other written vowels and in some other instances. *Palatalization: some historical palatalizations are indicated with the cedilla (''ç'') in French, Catalan, Occitan and Portuguese. In Spanish and several other world languages influenced by it, the grapheme '' ñ'' represents a palatal nasal consonant. *Separate pronunciation: when a vowel and another letter that would normally be combined into a digraph with a single sound are exceptionally pronounced apart, this is often indicated with a
diaeresis mark Diaeresis (dieresis, diëresis) may refer to: * Diaeresis (prosody), pronunciation of vowels in a diphthong separately, or the division made in a line of poetry when the end of a foot coincides with the end of a word * Diaeresis (linguistics), o ...
on the vowel. This is particularly common in the case of ''gü'' /ɡw/ before ''e'' or ''i'', because plain ''gu'' in this case would be pronounced /ɡ/. This usage occurs in Spanish, French, Catalan and Occitan, and occurred before the 2009 spelling reform in Brazilian Portuguese. French also uses the diaeresis on the second of two adjacent vowels to indicate that both are pronounced separately, as in ''Noël'' "Christmas" and ''haïr'' "to hate". *Stress: the stressed vowel in a polysyllabic word may be indicated with an accent, when it cannot be predicted by rule. In Italian, Portuguese and Catalan, the choice of accent (acute, grave or circumflex) may depend on vowel quality. When no quality needs to be indicated, an acute accent is normally used (''ú''), but Italian and Romansh use a grave accent (''ù''). Portuguese puts a diacritic on all stressed monosyllables that end in ''a e o as es os'', to distinguish them from unstressed function words: ''chá'' "tea", ''más'' "bad (fem. pl.)", ''sé'' "seat (of government)", ''dê'' "give! (imperative)", ''mês'' "month", ''só'' "only", ''nós'' "we" (cf. ''mas'' "but", ''se'' "if/oneself", ''de'' "of", ''nos'' "us"). Word-final stressed vowels in polysyllables are marked by the grave accent in Italian, thus ''università'' "university/universities", ''virtù'' "virtue/virtues", resulting in occasional minimal or near-minimal pairs such as ''parlo'' "I speak" ≠ ''parlò'' "s/he spoke", ''capi'' "heads, bosses" ≠ ''capì'' "s/he understood", ''gravita'' "it, s'/he gravitates" ≠ ''gravità'' "gravity, seriousness". *Homophones: words (especially monosyllables) that are pronounced exactly or nearly the same way and are spelled identically, but have different meanings, can be differentiated by a diacritic. Typically, if one of the pair is stressed and the other isn't, the stressed word gets the diacritic, using the appropriate diacritic for notating stressed syllables (see above). Portuguese does this consistently as part of notating stress in certain monosyllables, whether or not there is an unstressed homophone (see examples above). Spanish also has many pairs of identically pronounced words distinguished by an acute accent on the stressed word: ''si'' "if" vs. ''sí'' "yes", ''mas'' "but" vs. ''más'' "more", ''mi'' "my" vs. ''mí'' "me", ''se'' "oneself" vs. ''sé'' "I know", ''te'' "you (object)" vs. ''té'' "tea", ''que/quien/cuando/como'' "that/who/when/how" vs. ''qué/quién/cuándo/cómo'' "what?/who?/when?/how?", etc. A similar strategy is common for monosyllables in writing Italian, but not necessarily determined by stress: stressed ''dà'' "it, s/he gives" vs. unstressed ''da'' "by, from", but also ''tè'' "tea" and ''te'' "you", both capable of bearing phrasal stress. Catalan has some pairs where both words are stressed, and one is distinguished by a vowel-quality diacritic, e.g. ''os'' "bone" vs. ''ós'' "bear". When no vowel-quality needs distinguishing, French and Catalan use a grave accent: French ''ou'' "or" vs. ''où'' "where", French ''la'' "the" vs. ''là'' "there", Catalan ''ma'' "my" vs. ''mà'' "hand".


Upper and lower case

Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "
case Case or CASE may refer to: Containers * Case (goods), a package of related merchandise * Cartridge case or casing, a firearm cartridge component * Bookcase, a piece of furniture used to store books * Briefcase or attaché case, a narrow box to ca ...
s" of the alphabet: majuscule ("uppercase" or "capital letters"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and minuscule ("lowercase"), derived from Carolingian writing and Medieval quill pen handwriting which were later adapted by printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In particular, all Romance languages capitalize (use uppercase for the first letter of) the following words: the first word of each complete sentence, most words in names of people, places, and organizations, and most words in titles of books. The Romance languages do not follow the German practice of capitalizing all nouns including common ones. Unlike English, the names of months, days of the weeks, and derivatives of proper nouns are usually not capitalized: thus, in Italian one capitalizes ''Francia'' ("France") and ''Francesco'' ("Francis"), but not ''francese'' ("French") or ''francescano'' ("Franciscan"). However, each language has some exceptions to this general rule.


Vocabulary comparison

The tables below provide a vocabulary comparison that illustrates a number of examples of sound shifts that have occurred between Latin and Romance languages. Words are given in their conventional spellings. In addition, for French the actual pronunciation is given, due to the dramatic differences between spelling and pronunciation. (French spelling approximately reflects the pronunciation of
Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...
, c. 1200 AD.)


Degrees of

lexical similarity In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. ...
among the Romance languages

Data from Ethnologue:''Ethnologue, Languages of the World,'' 15th edition, SIL International, 2005.


See also

*
Romance languages linguistics Romance linguistics is the study of linguistics of Romance languages. Basic features Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: * Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system ...
* Italo-Celtic * Romance peoples * Legacy of the Roman Empire * Southern Romance * African Romance *
British Latin British Latin or British Vulgar Latin was the Vulgar Latin spoken in Great Britain in the Roman and sub-Roman periods. While Britain formed part of the Roman Empire, Latin became the principal language of the elite, especially in the more roman ...
*
Moselle Romance Moselle Romance (german: Moselromanisch; french: Roman de la Moselle) is an extinct Gallo-Romance (most probably Langue d'oïl) dialect that developed after the fall of the Roman Empire along the Moselle river in modern-day Germany, near the b ...
*
Pannonian Romance Pannonian Romance was spoken by Romanized Celtic and Illyrian peoples that developed in Pannonia, between modern-day Vienna and Belgrade, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Despite the Romanized population being mentioned in several ...
*
Romance-speaking Africa Romance-speaking Africa or Latin Africa consists of the countries and territories in Africa whose official or main languages are Romance ones, and countries which have significant populations that speak Romance languages: French, Portuguese, S ...
* Romance-speaking Europe * Romance-speaking world


Notes


References

Overviews: *Frederick Browning Agard. ''A Course in Romance Linguistics''. Vol. 1: ''A Synchronic View'', Vol. 2: ''A Diachronic View''. Georgetown University Press, 1984. * Reprint 2003. * *Gerhard Ernst et al., eds. ''Romanische Sprachgeschichte: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Geschichte der romanischen Sprachen''. 3 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003 (vol. 1), 2006 (vol. 2). * *Martin Maiden, John Charles Smith & Adam Ledgeway, eds., ''The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages''. Vol. 1: ''Structures'', Vol. 2: ''Contexts''. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011 (vol. 1) & 2013 (vol. 2). *Martin Maiden & Adam Ledgeway, eds. ''The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. * * Phonology: * *Cravens, Thomas D. ''Comparative Historical Dialectology: Italo-Romance Clues to Ibero-Romance Sound Chang''e. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. *Sónia Frota & Pilar Prieto, eds. ''Intonation in Romance''. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. *Christoph Gabriel & Conxita Lleó, eds. ''Intonational Phrasing in Romance and Germanic: Cross-Linguistic and Bilingual studies''. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. *Philippe Martin. ''The Structure of Spoken Language: Intonation in Romance''. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. *Rodney Sampson. ''Vowel Prosthesis in Romance''. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Lexicon: * French: * * * Portuguese: * * Spanish: * * * * Italian: * * * Rhaeto-Romance: *John Haiman & Paola Benincà, eds., ''The Rhaeto-Romance Languages''. London: Routledge, 1992.


External links


Michael de Vaan, ''Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages,'' Brill, 2008, 826pp. (part available freely online)Michael Metzeltin, ''Las lenguas románicas estándar. Historia de su formación y de su uso'', Oviedo, 2004Orbis Latinus, site on Romance languagesHugh Wilkinson's papers on Romance LanguagesSpanish is a Romance language, but what does that have to do with the type of romance between lovers?
dictionary.com
Comparative Grammar of the Romance LanguagesComparison of the computer terms in Romance languages
{{DEFAULTSORT:Romance languages Latino-Faliscan languages Articles citing Nationalencyklopedin Articles containing Medieval Latin-language text