The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The Romance languages have more than 600 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa; as well as in many smaller regions scattered through the world.
All Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of soldiers, settlers, and slaves of the Roman Empire, which was substantially different from the Classical Latin of the Roman literati. Between 200 BC and 100 AD, the expansion of the Empire, coupled with administrative and educational policies of Rome, made Vulgar Latin the dominant native language over a wide area spanning from the Iberian Peninsula to the Western coast of the Black Sea. During the Empire's decadence and after its collapse and fragmentation in 5th century, Vulgar Latin began to evolve independently within each local area, and eventually diverged into dozens of distinct languages. The oversea empires established by Spain, Portugal and France after the 15th century then spread Romance to the other continents — to such an extent that about 2/3 of all Romance speakers are now outside Europe.
In spite of multiple influences from pre-Roman languages and from later invasions, the phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax of all Romance languages are predominantly derived from Vulgar Latin. As a result, the group shares a number of linguistic features that set it apart from other Indo-European branches. In particular, with only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the declension system of Classical Latin, and as a result have a relatively rigid SVO sentence structure and make extensive use of prepositions.
There is very little documentary evidence about the nature of Vulgar Latin, and that little is often hard to interpret or generalize. In any case, many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers — that is, more likely to be natives of the conquered lands than natives of Rome. It is believed that Vulgar Latin already had most of the features that are shared by all Romance languages and distinguish them from Classical Latin — such as the almost complete loss of the declension system and its replacement by prepositions, the loss of the neuter gender, of comparative inflections, and of many verbal tenses, the use of articles, and the change in pronunciation of /k/ and /g/.
The political decadence of the Roman Empire in the 5th century and the large-scale migrations of the period, notably the Germanic incursions, led to a fragmentation of the Latin-speaking world into several independent states. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by Germanic and Slavic tribes, Huns, and Turks, isolating Romania from the rest of Latin Europe. Latin also disappeared from England, which had been for a time part of the Empire. On the other hand, the Germanic tribes that had entered Italy, France, and the Iberian Peninsula eventually adopted Latin and the remains of Roman culture, and so Latin continued to be the dominant language in those areas.
Between the 5th and 10th century, spoken Vulgar Latin underwent divergent evolution in various parts of its domain, leading to dozens of distinct languages. This evolution is poorly documented, since the written language for all purposes continued to be a Latin close to the Classical variant.
Between the 10th and 13th centuries, some local vernaculars came to be written, and began to supplant Latin in many of its roles. In some countries, such as Portugal, this transition was speeded up by force of law, whereas in other countries, such as Italy, the rise of the vernacular was the result of many prominent poets and writers adopting it as their medium.
The invention of the press apparently slowed down the evolution of Romance language from the 16th century on, and brought instead a tendency to uniformization of language within political boundaries. In France, for instance, the "Francien" spoken in the region of Paris gradually spread over the whole country, while the Langue d'Oc and Franco-Provençal of the south lost much ground.
The term "Romance" comes from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice, derived from romanicus, in the expression romanice loqui (which designated the vulgar languages of Latin origin, and which contrasted to barbarice loqui, the non-Latin "barbarian" languages of the invaders, and latine loqui, used for the Latin taught in schools)[1]. From this adverb originated the noun romance, which applied initially to anything written in a romanice loqui.
The most spoken Romance language is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian and Catalan. These six languages are all main and official national languages in more than one country each. A few other languages have official status on a regional or otherwise limited level, for instance Sardinian and Valdôtain in Italy, Romansh in Switzerland, Galician, and Aranese in Spain.
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, and a potential source of separatist movements; therefore they have generally fought to eliminate it — by massively promoting the use of the official language, by restricting the use of the "other" languages in the media, by characterizing them as mere "dialects" — or worse.
In the last decades of the 20th century, however, increased sensibility to the rights of minorities have allowed those languages to recover some of their prestige and of their lost rights. However, it is not clear whether those political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of the non-official languages.
As members of the Indo-European (IE) family, Romance languages have a number of features that are shared by other IE subfamilies (such as the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and Indo-Persian languages, Albanian, Armenian, Greek, Lithuanian, etc.), and in particular with English; but which set them apart from non-IE languages like Arabic, Basque, Hungarian, Tamil, and many more. These features include:
The Romance languages share a number of features that were inherited from Classical Latin, and collectively set them apart from most other Indo-European languages.
Romance languages also have a number of features that are not shared with Classical Latin. Most of these features are thought to be inherited from Vulgar Latin.
The Romance languages also share a number of features that were not the result of common inheritance, but rather of various cultural diffusion processes in the Middle Ages — such as literary diffusion, commercial and military interactions, political domination, influence of the Catholic Church, and (especially in later times) conscious attempts to "purify" the languages by reference to Classical Latin. Some of those features have in fact spread to other non-Romance (and even non-Indo-European) languages, chiefly in Europe. Here are some of these "late origin" shared features:
In spite of their common origin, the descendants of Vulgar Latin have many differences. These occur at all levels, including the sound systems, the orthography, the nominal, verbal, and adjectival inflections, the auxiliary verbs and the semantics of verbal tenses, the function words, the rules for subordinate clauses, and, especially, in their vocabularies. While most of those differences are clearly due to independent development after the breakup of the Roman Empire (including invasions and cultural exchanges), one must also consider the influence of prior languages in territories of Latin Europe that fell under Roman rule, and possible inhomogenities in Vulgar Latin itself.
It is often said that Portuguese and French are the most innovative of the Romance languages, each in different ways, that Sardinian and Romanian are the most isolated and conservative variants, and that the languages of Italy other than Sardinian (including Italian) occupy a middle ground. Some even claim that Languedocian Occitan is the "most average" western Romance language. However, these evaluations are largely subjective, as they depend on how much weight one assigns to specific features. In fact all Romance languages, including Sardinian and Romanian, are all vastly different from its common ancestor.
Romanian (together with other related minor languages, like Aromanian) in fact has a number of grammatical features which are unique within Romance, but are shared with other non-Romance languages of the Balkans, such as Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Serban. These features include, for example, the structure of the vestigial case system, the placement of articles as suffixes of the nouns (cer = "sky", cerul= "the sky"), and several more. This phenomenon, called the Balkan linguistic union, may be due to contacts between those languages in post-Roman times.
The vocabularies of Romance languages have undergone massive change since their birth, by various phonological processes that were characteristic of each language. Those changes applied more or less systematically to all words, but were often conditioned by the sound context or morphological structure.
Some languages have dropped letters from the original Latin words. French, in particular, has dropped all final vowels, and sometimes also the preceding consonant: thus Latin LUPUS and LUNA became Italian lupo and luna but French loup [lu] and lune [lyn]. Catalan, Occitan, and Romanian (Daco-Romanian) lost the final vowels in most masculine nouns and adjectives, but retained them in the feminine. Other languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Franco-Provençal, and the Southern dialects of Romanian have retained those vowels.
Some languages, like Portuguese, Spanish, and Venetian, have lost the final vowel -E from verbal infinitives, e.g. DĪCERE → Portuguese dizer ("to say"). Other common cases of final truncation are the verbal endings, eg. Latin AMĀT → Italian ama ("he loves"), AMĀBAM → amavo ("I loved"), AMĀBAT → amava ("he loved"), AMĀBATIS → amavate ("You pl. loved"), etc..
Sounds have often been dropped in the middle of the word, too; e.g. Latin LUNA → Portuguese lua, CRĒDERE → Spanish creer ("to believe").
On the other hand, some languages have inserted many epenthetic vowels in certain contexts. For instance Spanish and Portuguese have generally inserted an e in front of Latin words that began with S + consonant, such as SPERŌ → espero ("I hope"). French has gone the same way, but then dropped the s: SPATULA → épaule ("shoulder").
The position of the stressed syllable in a word generally varies from word to word in each Romance language, and often moves as the word is inflected. Sometimes the stress is lexically significant, e.g. Italian Papa ['papa] ("Pope") and papà [pa'pa] ("daddy"), or Spanish imperfect subjunctive cantara ("he would sing") and future cantará ("he will sing"). However, the main function of Romance stress in appears to be a clue for speech segmentation — namely to help the listener identify the word boundaries in normal speech, where inter-word spaces are usually absent.
In Romance languages, the stress is usually confined to one of the last three syllables of the word. That limit may be occasionally exceeded by some verbs with attached clitics, e.g. Italian mettiamocene [meːˌ'tjaˌmoˌtʃeˌne] ("let's put some of it in there") or Spanish entregándomelo [enˌtreˌ'ganˌdoˌmeˌlo] ("delivering it to me"). Originally the stress was predominatly in the next-to-last syllable, but that pattern has changed considerably in some languages. In French, for instance, the loss of final vowels has left the stress almost exclusively on the last syllable.
Some Romance languages form plurals by adding /s/ (derived from the plural of the Latin accusative case), while others form the plural by changing the final vowel (by influence of the Latin nominative ending /i/). See La Spezia-Rimini Line for more information.
Some Romance languages use a version of Latin plus, others a version of magis.
The common word for "nothing" is nada in Spanish and Portuguese, rien in French, res in Catalan, nimic in Romanian, and niente and nulla in Italian. It is said that all three roots derive from different parts of a Latin phrase NULLAM REM NATAM ("no thing born"), an emphatic idiom for "nothing".
Romanian constructs the names of the numbers 11–19 by a regular pattern which could be translated as "one-over-ten", "two-over-ten", etc.. All the other Romance languages use a pattern like "one-ten", "two-ten", etc. for 11–15, and the pattern "ten-and-seven, "ten-and-eight", "ten-and-nine" for 17–19. For 16, however, they split into two groups: some use "six-ten", some use "ten-and-six":
Clasical Latin, by the way, uses the "one-and-ten" pattern for 11–17 (ūndecim, duodecim, ..., septendecim), but then switches to "two-off-twenty" (duodēvigintī) and "one-off-twenty" (ūndēvigintī). For the sake of comparison, note that English and German use two special words for 11 and 12, then the pattern "three-ten", "four-ten", ..., "nine-ten" for 13–19.
The verbs derived from Latin HABĒRE, TENĒRE, and ESSE are used differently for the concepts of "to have" (something), "to have" (auxiliary verb for complex tenses), and "there is" (existence statements). If we use T for TENĒRE, H for HABĒRE, and E for ESSE, the various languages classify as follows:
For example:
Most of these languages also use the TENĒRE verb for the sense of "to hold", e.g. Italian tieni il libro, French tiens le livre, Spanish tienes el libro ("you hold the book"). However, Portuguese normally uses a different verb for that sense, usually segurar (from the Vulgar Latin ASSECURARE, "to make secure"). On the other hand, Portuguese informally uses the T verb in the existential sense, besides the H verb, e.g. tem água no copo instead of há água no copo ("there is water in the glass").
Some languages use their equivalent of "have" as an auxiliary verb to form the perfect forms (e. g. French passé composé) of all verbs; others use "be" for some verbs and "have" for others.
In the latter, the verbs which use "be" as an auxiliary are unaccusative verbs, that is, intransitive verbs that show motion not directly initiated by the subject or changes of state, such as "fall", "come", "become". All other verbs (intransitive unergative verbs and all transitive verbs) use "have". For example, in French, J'ai vu "I have seen" vs. Je suis tombé "I am fallen" ("I have fallen").
Portuguese is unique in that its equivalent of the passé composé — usually made with ter (Spanish tener) but occasionally with haver — is uncommon and does not have the same meaning as for other Romance languages. The phrase eu tenho feito means I have been doing rather than I have done, which would be rendered with the simple past (eu fiz).
Some languages (e.g. Spanish, and written French and Italian) make a distinction between a preterite and a perfect tense (cf. English I did vs. I have done). Others (Portuguese, spoken French and Italian) contain only one tense, which renders both meanings. French and Italian use the compound past for this, while Portuguese and Sicilian use the simple past.
While most of the 22 basic Latin Letters have similar sound values in all Romance languages, the values of some letters have 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 not recorded in Latin, or to get around previously established spelling conventions.
A characteristic feature of the the writing systems of all Romance languages is that the Latin letters C and G — which usually sound like [k] and [g] — have other sounds when they come before E and I. This is due to a general palatalization or affrication of the [k] and [g] sounds before front vowels, like [i] and [e], which is believed to have occurred in the transition from Classical to Vulgar Latin. Since the written form of all the affected words was tied to the Classical language, the shift was accommodated by a change in the pronunciation rules. However, the new sounds of C and G in those contexts differ from language to language.
The spelling rules of most Romance languages are fairly complex, and subject to considerable regional variation. To a first approximation, the pronunciation of non-combined letters can be summarized as follows:
Otherwise, letters that are not combined in digraphs generally have the same sounds as in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), whose design was in fact greatly influenced by the Romance spelling systems.
Since most Romance languages have more sounds that can be accommodated in the Roman Latin alphabet they all resorted to the use of digraphs and trigraphs — combinations of two or three letters with conventional sound values. The concept (but not the actual combinations) derives from Classical Latin; which used, for example, TH, PH, and CH when transliterating the Greek letters "θ", "φ", and "χ". Some of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:
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 are now pronounced [k] or [ʃ], [f], [ʀ] and [t], respectively.
For most languages in this family, consonant length is no longer phonemically distinctive. The double consonants in French spelling are due to etymology. However, Italian and Sicilian do have long consonants like BB, CC, DD, etc., where the doubling indicates a short pause before the consonant, which often has lexical value: e.g. note ['nɔte] ("notes") vs notte ['nɔːte] ("night"). They may even occur at the beginning of words in Neapolitan and Sicilian, and are occasionally written, e.g. Sicilian cchiù (more), and ddà (there). In general, the letters B, R and Z are long at the start of a word. In Jèrriais, long consonants are marked with an apostrophe: S'S is a long [z], SS'S is a long [s], T'T is a long [t].
Diacritics common across Romance languages are the acute accent (á), the grave accent (à), the circumflex accent (â), the diaeresis mark (ü), the cedilla (ç), and the tilde (ñ). French spelling includes the etymological ligatures œ and (more rarely) æ. Romanian has a few diacritics of its own.
An accent mark placed over a vowel may denote stress, height, or both. In Spanish, only stress is indicated, with an acute accent. Italian marks stress with a grave accent, except on the close-mid vowels, which are sometimes marked with an acute accent. Catalan marks stress with an acute accent, except on low vowels, which take a grave accent. Portuguese marks stressed vowels with an acute accent, except for close-mid or central vowels, which take a circumflex accent. In French and Romanian, diacritics just indicate vowel height. French é is a close-mid vowel and French è is an open-mid vowel, like in Italian and Catalan. Romanian â, î, ă are central vowels, like Portuguese â.
Homophones are distinguished by a grave accent in Italian and French, and by an acute accent in Spanish.
Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "cases" of the alphabet: "uppercase" (or "capital letters"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and "lowercase", derived from Medieval quill pen handwriting and adapted by printers in the 15th and 16th centuries.
In particular, all Romance languages presently 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. Text in all upper case is used for emphasis and is generally interpreted as shouting. 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 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.
Modern Romance texts also use two main variant letter styles, conventionally called "roman" (used for most text) and "italic" (a slanted and usually more rounded form, used for quotations and emphasis, and generally read with a higher-pitched voice). Finally, any of these can be printed in "boldface" (with thicker strokes, understood as a louder and more forceful tone) for stronger emphasis.
The formation of Iberian Romance languages followed more or less this process:
It is important to note that power structures enormously influenced the formation of the Iberian languages. If kingdoms and states had formed in a different fashion, there could now be a single Galician-Portuguese language, or a multiplicity of languages. This political aspect was important in the development of every language.
Thus, there are four major Romance languages in Iberia today (apart from three minor ones, like Astur-Leonese, also known as Bable in Asturias and Mirandese (in Portugal); Aragonese and Occitan):
Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan have the status of international languages, being officially spoken in more than one state:
Occitan is also an international language, as it is official in small regions of Spain and Italy.
Astur-Leonese is also an international language, but not officially so, since it is official only in a small region of just one state in Portugal.
Care should be taken to differentiate these two uses of the term oïl:
Langue d'oïl is an Old French term meaning language of oïl—i.e. language in which the word for "yes" is oïl.
The medieval Italian poet Dante in his De vulgari eloquentia wrote in Latin: "nam alii oc, alii si, alii vero dicunt oil" ("some say oc, others say si, others say oïl"), thereby classifying the Romance languages into three groups: oïl languages (in northern France); oc languages (in southern France) and si languages (in Italy and Iberia). Vulgar Latin developed different methods of signifying assent: hoc ille ("that (is) it") and hoc ("that"), which became the langues d'oïl and langue d'oc (or Occitan language), respectively. Subsequent development changed "oïl" into "oui" as in modern French. (Other Romance languages derive their word for yes from the Latin sic, "thus", such as the Spanish sí, Italian sì, or Portuguese sim.)
Modern linguists typically divide the languages spoken in medieval France into three geographical subgroups: Langue d'oïl and Langue d'oc are the two major groups; the third group, Franco-Provençal, is considered a transitional language between the two other groups.
The Oïl languages in their range from Belgium across northern and central France and the Channel Islands form a dialect continuum.
The language generally referred to as French is an Oïl language, but the territories of France have for centuries included large groups of speakers of Oïl languages other than French, as well as speakers of languages outside the Oïl language family (see Languages of France).
Although there were competing literary standards among the Oïl languages in the mediaeval period, the centralisation of the French kingdom and its influence even outside its formal borders sent most of the Oïl languages into comparative obscurity for several centuries.
Two main theories have been put forward to explain the rise of French language:
It is claimed that Francien, the Oïl language of the Paris region and therefore of the French court, was simply imposed as the official language in all the territory of the kingdom because it was the language the king spoke. This Francien, it is claimed, became the modern French language.
Current linguistic thinking mostly discounts the Francien theory, although it is still often quoted in popular textbooks.
Most linguists working in the field tend to advance variations on the theory that the "French" language, imposed by the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts to replace Latin, was not a particular variety of Oïl language, but rather a generalised administrative language, shorn of distinguishing regional features and equally comprehensible to all—a lingua franca.
It is argued that this language was not intended to become a national language, merely a chancery language for law and administration. However, the development of literature in this new language encouraged writers to use French rather than their own regional languages. This led to the decline of vernacular literature.
Until the First World War, French was not the primary language of the French people—the regional languages of France were still the languages most used in the home and in the fields. This was also generally the case with the Oïl languages.
Apart from French, an official language in many countries, the Oïl languages have enjoyed little status.
Currently Walloon, Lorrain (under the local name of Gaumais) and Champenois have the status of regional languages of Wallonia.
The languages of the Channel Islands enjoy a certain status under the governments of their Bailiwicks and within the regional and lesser-used language framework of the British-Irish Council.
The French government recognises the Oïl languages as Languages of France but has been constitutionally barred from ratifying the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
The English language was heavily influenced by contact with Norman following the Norman Conquest and much of the adopted vocabulary shows typically Norman features.
The French spoken in Belgium shows some influence from Walloon.
The langues oïl were more or less influenced by the native languages of the conquering Germanic tribes, notably the Franks.
The development of French in North America was influenced by the speech of settlers originating from north-western France, many of whom introduced features of their Oïl varieties into the French they spoke.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Romance languages".
last update April 28th, 2006