Encyclopedia
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 BCE and 100 CE, 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 decline and after its collapse and fragmentation in the 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 two-thirds of all Romance speakers are now outside Europe.
Despite 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.
History
Vulgar Latin
There is very little documentary evidence about the nature of Vulgar Latin, and what little there is, 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, which distinguishes 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 and .
Fall of the Empire
The political
decline 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 thus Latin continued to be the dominant language in those areas.
Latent incubation
Between the 5th and 10th Centuries, spoken Vulgar Latin underwent divergent evolution in various parts of its domain, leading to dozens of distinct languages. This evolution is poorly documented, as the written language for all purposes continued to be a Latin close to the Classical variant.
Recognition of the vernaculars
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 expedited 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.
Uniformization and standardization
The invention of the press apparently slowed down the evolution of Romance language from the 16th century on, and brought instead a tendency towards greater uniformity 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.
History of the name
The term "Romance" comes from the Vulgar Latin adverb
romanice, derived from
romanicus, as used in the expression
romanice loqui . From this adverb originated the noun
romance, which applied initially to anything written
romanice, "in the Roman vernacular".
Incidentally, "Romance" meaning "love story, love affair" has the same origin. In the
medieval literature of western Europe, while serious writing was usually in Latin, popular tales, often focusing on love, were composed in the vernacular and came to be called "romances".
Status
The most spoken Romance language is
Spanish, followed by
Portuguese,
French,
Italian,
Romanian and
Catalan. The first five 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
Friulian,
Sardinian and
Valdôtain in Italy;
Romansh in Switzerland;
Galician, Aranese and
Catalan in Spain . Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian are also official and working languages of the
European Union ; and Spanish and French are two of the six official languages of the
United Nations.
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 a potential source of separatist movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it—by extensively 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 sensitivity to the rights of minorities have allowed these languages to recover some of their prestige and lost rights. Yet, it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of the non-official languages.
Linguistic features
Features inherited from Indo-European
As members of the Indo-European family, Romance languages have a number of features that are shared by other IE subfamilies , 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:
- Almost all their words are classified into four major classes — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs — each with a specific set of possible syntactic roles.
- They have a complex system of word inflections to indicate syntactic relationships between words and to create derivative words in the same or in other classes.
- Inflection almost always consists in replacing a suffix of the word, and each word has relatively small set of "suffix slots".
- They are verb-centered; meaning that the basic clause structure consists of a verb, expressing an action involving one or more nouns — the arguments of the verb — that play specific semantic roles in the action and specific syntactic roles in the clause.
- The verb is inflected to indicate various aspects of the action, such as time, completeness or continuation; and also according to the grammatical person and grammatical number of one of the arguments, the subject.
- The verb can be further modified by adverbs, or by additional nouns preceded by prepositions that indicate their semantic roles.
- Nouns are classified into several grammatical genders and grammatical numbers.
- Adjectives are noun modifiers; each adjective is normally inflected so as to echo the gender and number of the noun it is attached to.
- Verbs are not inflected according to the gender of the subject .
- Tone is used only at the sentence level, e.g. to indicate surprise or interrogation .
Features inherited from Classical Latin
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.
- They have lost the dual number, retaining only singular and plural, except for the equivalent to the English word "both": "ambos" in Portuguese and Spanish, "ambdós" in Catalan and "ambii" in Romanian.
- In most languages, personal pronouns have different forms according to their syntactic role in a sentence ; there is usually a form for the subject another for the object , and a third set of personal pronouns used after prepositions or in stressed positions. Third person pronouns often have different forms for the direct object , the indirect object , and the reflexive.
- They all have retained at least three of Latin's verbal tenses: present, e.g. DICIT "he says", past perfect DIXIT "he said", past imperfect DICEBAT "he was saying".
- For each tense, there are usually six distinct verbal inflections, encoding each of the three persons and two numbers of the subject.
- They all had originally two copular verbs, derived from the Latin STARE and ESSE . However, the distinction was eventually lost in some languages, notably French, which now have only the first copula. In French, stare and esse had become ester and estre by the late middle ages. Due to phonological development, there were the forms êter and être, which eventually merged to être.
- At least one form of the subjunctive mood remains in use , and it is clearly distinguishable from the indicative mood.
- There is a special imperative form for the second person.
- Most of them are null-subject languages. French is one notable exception.
- Most of them have a T-V distinction, although in many cases it has been considerably transformed since the Middle Ages.
- Italian and Sardinian have kept the phonological opposition between simple and long consonants, although it was lost in all other languages in the group. Sicilian, Neapolitan and Jèrriais have gemination.
- All those languages are written with the "core" Latin alphabet of 22 letters — A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Y, Z — subsequently modified and augmented in various ways.
- In particular, the letters K and W are rarely used in most Romance languages — mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words, as they were in late Latin.
Features inherited from Vulgar Latin
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. Even though the Romance languages are all derived from Latin, they are arguably much closer to each other than to their common ancestor. The main difference is the loss of the case system of Classical Latin, an essential feature which allowed great freedom of word order, and has no counterpart in any Romance language . In this regard, the distance between any modern Romance language and Latin is comparable to that between
Modern English and
Old English. While speakers of French, Spanish or Italian, for example, can quickly learn to see through the spelling changes and thus recognize many Latin words, they will often fail to understand the meaning of Latin sentences.
- There are no declensions, that is, nouns are no longer altered to indicate their grammatical roles.
- There are only two grammatical genders, having lost the neuter gender of Classical Latin. ; and Italian, which while not keeping the neuter gender intact, has residual traces of it represented by some words that switch gender between singular and plural, such as il dito , plural le dita, inherited from Latin digitum, plural digita.
- The normal clause structure is SVO, rather than SOV, and is much less flexible than in Latin.
- Adjectives generally follow the noun they modify.
- Many Latin constructions involving nominalized verbal forms were dropped in favor of constructions with subordinate clauses in all Romance languages except Italian. Examples : Tempore permittente, Tempo Permettendo - Hoc facto, Fatto Ciò.
- There are definite and indefinite grammatical articles, derived from Latin demonstratives and the numeral UNUS .
- Most Latin synthetic perfect tenses were lost, generally replaced by new compound forms with "to be" or "to have" + past participle.
- The Latin future tense was replaced by new synthetic future, based on infinitive + present or imperfect tense of HABERE , fused to form new inflections.
- A new conditional form was created, in a similar fashion to the future indicative.
- There is an elaborate system of pronouns which partially retain the distinction between Latin cases, some of them being clitic.
- The distinction between long and short vowels, believed to have been present in Classical Latin, was lost and replaced by a system of lexical stress, where one vowel of each word is pronounced slightly louder, or in a higher pitch, than the rest.
- Many Latin combining prefixes were incorporated in the lexicon as new roots and verb stems, e.g. Italian estrarre from Latin EX- and TRAHERE .
- The Latin letters C and G — which usually sound like and — have other sounds when they come before E and I.
Other shared features
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 conscious attempts to "purify" the languages by reference to Classical Latin. Some of those features have in fact spread to other non-Romance languages, chiefly in Europe. Here are some of these "late origin" shared features:
- Most Romance languages have polite forms of address that change the person and/or number of 2nd person subjects , such as the tu/vous contrast in French, the tú/usted in Spanish, the tu/você in Portuguese, the tu/Lei contrast in Italian or the tu/dumneavoastra contrast in Romanian.
- They all have a large collection of prefixes, stems, and suffixes retained or reintroduced from Greek and Latin, used to coin new words. Most of those have cognates in English, e.g. "tele-", "poly-", "meta-", "pseudo-", "dis-", "ex-", "post-", "-scope", "-logy", "-tion".
- They all replaced the Latin letter V by a new letter U when it had a vowel sound.
- Many of them introduced the new letter J .
- They are all presently written in a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "cases" of the alphabet, "uppercase" and "lowercase" , with similar rules for their usage.
- They also use very similar sets of punctuation marks.
Divergent 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 , 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 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 their common ancestor.
Romanian 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
Serbian. These features include, for example, the structure of the vestigial case system, the placement of articles as suffixes of the nouns , and several more. This phenomenon, called the
Balkan linguistic union, may be due to contacts between those languages in post-Roman times.
Sound changes
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 and
lune . Catalan, Occitan, and 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.
DICERE ? Portuguese
dizer . Other common cases of final truncation are the verbal endings, eg. Latin
AMAT ? Italian
ama ,
AMABAM ?
amavo ,
AMABAT ?
amava ,
AMABATIS ?
amavate , etc..
Sounds have often been dropped in the middle of the word, too; e.g. Latin
LUNA ? Galician and Portuguese
lua,
CREDERE ? Spanish
creer .
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
SPERO ?
espero . French has gone the same way, but then dropped the
s:
SPATULA ?
épaule . In the case of Italian, a unique article,
lo for the definite and
uno for the indefinite, is used for masculine
S + consonant words , as well as all masculine words beginning with
Z .
Lexical stress
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 and
papà , or Spanish imperfect subjunctive
cantara and future
cantará . 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 or
Metintilu in Friulian or Spanish
entregándomelo . Originally the stress was predominatly in the 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.
Formation of plurals
Some Romance languages form plurals by adding , while others form the plural by changing the final vowel . See
La Spezia-Rimini Line for more information.
- Vowel change: Italian, Romanian.
- Plural in : Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian.
- Special case of French: Originally fell into the first group, but the final was subsequently lost, meaning that singular and plural nouns are usually homophonous in isolation . Many determiners have a distinct plural formed by changing the vowel and allowing in liaison.
Borrowed words
Vulgar Latin has borrowed many words, often from
Germanic languages that replaced words from Classical Latin during the
Migration Period, even including common basic vocabulary. Notable examples is
*blancus, that replaced Classical Latin
albus in most major languages and dialects except for
Romanian,
*guerra that replaced
bellum except for
Romanian, and words for the
cardinal directions, where words similar to English north, south, east and west replaced the Classical Latin words
borealis ,
australis ,
occidentalis and
orientalis everywhere . See History of French.
Derivations
Words for "more"
Some Romance languages use a version of Latin
plus, others a version of
magis.
- Plus-derived: French plus , Italian più , Friulian plui dialectal Catalan pus , Romansh
- Magis-derived: Galician and Portuguese , Spanish , Catalan , Venetian Occitan , Romanian , Italian
Words for "nothing"
The common word for "nothing" is
nada in Spanish and Portuguese,
nada and
ren in Galician,
rien in French,
res in Catalan,
ren in Occitan,
nimic in Romanian, and
niente and
nulla in Italian,
nue and
nuie in Friulian. It is said that all three roots derive from different parts of a Latin phrase
NULLAM REM NATAM , an emphatic idiom for "nothing".
The number 16
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":
- "Sixteen": Catalan setze, French seize, Italian sedici, Friulian sedis, Lombard sedas / sedes, Franco-Provençal sèze, Occitan setze, Sardinian sédichi.
- "Ten and six": Portuguese dezasseis or dezesseis, Galician dezaseis, Spanish dieciséis, marchigiano dialect digissei.
- "Six over ten": Romanian saisprezece .
Classical Latin uses the "one-and-ten" pattern for 11–17 , but then switches to "two-off-twenty" and "one-off-twenty" . For the sake of comparison, note that English and German use two special words derived from "one left over" and "two left over" for 11 and 12, then the pattern "three-ten", "four-ten", ..., "nine-ten" for 13–19.
To have and to hold
The verbs derived from Latin
HABERE,
TENERE, and
ESSE are used differently for the concepts of "to have" , "to have" , and "there is" . If we use
T for
TENERE,
H for
HABERE, and
E for
ESSE, the various languages classify as follows:
- TTH: Portuguese, Galician.
- THH: Spanish, Catalan.
- HHH: Occitan, French.
- HHE: Romanian, Italian
For example:
- English: I have, I have done, there is
- Portuguese: tenho, tenho feito, há
- Spanish: tengo, he hecho, hay
- Catalan: tinc, he fet, hi ha
- French: j'ai, j'ai fait, il y a
- Italian: ho, ho fatto, c'è
- Romanian: am, am facut, este
- Friulian: o ai, o ai fat, a 'nd è, al è
Most of these languages also use the
TENERE verb for the sense of "to hold", e.g. Italian
tieni il libro, French
tu tiens le livre, Catalan
tens el llibre, Spanish
tienes el libro, Romanian
tine cartea, Galician
Tes o libro, Friulian
Tu tu tegnis il libri . However, Portuguese normally uses a different verb for that sense, usually
segurar . On the other hand, Brazilian Portuguese informally uses the
T verb in the existential sense, e.g.
tem água no copo instead of
há água no copo . Also, archaic Galician-Portuguese used
H in permanent states
eu hei um nome and
T in non-permanent ones
eu tenho um livro .
To have or to be
Some languages use their equivalent of "have" as an auxiliary verb to form the perfect forms of all verbs; others use "be" for some verbs and "have" for others.
- "Have" only: Standard Catalan, Spanish, Romanian, Sicilian.
- "Have" and "be": Occitan, French, Italian, some dialects of Catalan .
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 use "have". For example, in French,
J'ai vu "I have seen" vs.
Je suis tombé "I am fallen" .
I did or I have done
Some languages make a distinction between a preterite and a perfect tense . Others contain only one tense, which renders both meanings. French and Italian use the compound past for this, while Sicilian uses the simple past.
Portuguese is unique in that its equivalent of the
passé composé — usually made with
ter is uncommon and does not have the same meaning as for other Romance languages. The phrase
eu tenho feito is closer in meaning to
I have been doing than to
I have done, which would be rendered with the simple past
eu fiz . Galician is also unique in that it does not use auxiliary verbs in perfect tenses, except a similar use of Portuguese
ter .
Writing systems
Letter values
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 to represent phonetic phenomena not recorded in Latin, or to get around previously established spelling conventions.
A characteristic feature of the writing systems of all Romance languages is that the Latin letters
C and
G — which originally always represented and respectively — represent other sounds when they come before
E,
I, and in some cases
Y. This is due to a general palatalization of and before front vowels like and . This 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 phonetic representation of non-combined letters can be summarized as follows:
- C: generally , but "softened" before E or I in most Romance languages — to in French, Portuguese, Occitan, Catalan, and American Spanish; to in Italian and Romanian; and to in Peninsular Spanish.
- G: generally or , but "softened" before E or I in most languages — to in French, Portuguese, Occitan and Catalan; to in Italian and Romanian; and to in some dialects of Spanish, in some dialects of Spanish.
- H: silent in most languages, but represents in Romanian and Gascon Occitan. Used in various digraphs .
- J: represents in most languages; in some dialects of Spanish, in other dialects; in several of Italy's languages, but normally replaced with I in native Italian words.
- S: normally represents at syllable onset, but usually between vowels in Italian, French, Portuguese, Occitan and Catalan. In the syllable coda, may have special allophones.
- W: used only in Walloon. Represents in French, with the exception of words borrowed from English.
- X: at the beginning of words, represents Y: used in French and Spanish for the vowel , and in Spanish also as a consonant , or .
- Z: either or in Italian; or in Galician and Spanish; and in most of the other languages.
Otherwise, letters that are not combined as digraphs generally have the same sounds as in the
International Phonetic Alphabet , whose design was, in fact, greatly influenced by the 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 sound value. The concept derives from Classical Latin; which used, for example,
TH,
PH, and
CH when transliterating the Greek letters "?", "?" , and "?"
- CI': used in Italian and Romanian to represent before A, O, or U.
- CH: used in Italian and Romanian to represent before E or I; in Spanish and Galician; and in most other languages.
- ÇH': used in Poitevin-Saintongeais for voiceless palatal fricative
- DD: used in Sicilian to represent the voiced retroflex plosive .
- DJ: used in Walloon for .
- GI: used in Italian and Romanian to represent before A, O, or U.
- GH: used in Italian and Romanian to represent before E or I, and in Galician for the voiceless pharyngeal fricative .
- GLI: used in Italian for .
- GN: used in French and Italian for , as in champignon or gnocchi.
- GU: used before E or I to represent or in all Romance languages except Italian and Romanian.
- LH: used in Portuguese, reintegrationist Galician and Occitan for .
- LL: used in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Norman and Dgèrnésiais, originally for which has merged with . Represents in French unless it follows I when it represents .
- ?L: used in Catalan for a long .
- NH: used in Portuguese, reintegrationist Galician and Occitan for , used in Galician for .
- NY: used in Catalan for .
- QU: used before E or I to represent , in all Romance languages except Italian and Romanian.
- RR: used between vowels in several languages to denote a trilled or a guttural R, instead of the flap .
- SC: used before E or I in Italian for , and in French and Spanish as as in words of certain etymology.
- SCI: used in Italian to represent before A, O, or U.
- SH: used in Aranese Catalan for .
- SS: used in Italian, French, Portuguese, Occitan and Catalan for between vowels.
- TH: used in Jèrriais for ; used in Aranese for either or
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.
Gemination
For most languages in this family, consonant length is no longer phonemically distinctive or present. 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 hold before the consonant is released, which often has lexical value: e.g.
note vs.
notte . They may even occur at the beginning of words in Neapolitan and Sicilian, and are occasionally written, e.g. Sicilian
cchiù , and
ddà . 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 ,
SS'S is a long , and
T'T is a long . In Catalan, there exists a geminate sound written
?l, but it is usually pronounced as a simple sound in colloquial speech.
Diacritics and special characters
Diacritics common across Romance languages are the acute accent , the grave accent , the circumflex accent , the diaeresis mark , the cedilla , and the
tilde . French spelling includes the etymological ligatures
œ and
æ.
Romanian has a few diacritics of its own.
An accent mark placed over a vowel generally denotes stress,
height, or both. In Spanish, only stress is indicated, with an acute accent. Romanian
â/
î and
a are central vowels; stress is not marked in this language. Catalan regularly marks stress with an acute accent on high vowels, and with a grave accent on low vowels. Similarly, French
é is a high-mid vowel and French
è is a low-mid vowel, although in French stress is not indicated with diacritics. Italian marks stress with the grave accent, except on high
e and
o, which are sometimes marked with an acute accent. Portuguese marks stress with the acute accent, except for high
a,
e,
o, which take a circumflex accent.
Homophones may be differentiated by a grave accent in Italian and French, and by an acute accent in Spanish.
Upper and lower case
Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "cases" of the alphabet: majuscule , derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and minuscule , derived from
Carolingian writing and Medieval
quill pen handwriting which were later adapted by printers in the 15th and 16th centuries.
In particular, all Romance languages presently capitalize 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 and
Francesco , but not
francese or
francescano . However, each language has some exceptions to this general rule.
Vocabulary comparison
The table below provides a vocabulary comparison that illustrates a number of examples of sound shifts that have occurred between Latin and the main romance languages, along with a selection of minority languages.
| English | Latin
| Catalan | French | Italian | Jèrriais | Portuguese | Provençal | Romanian | Sardinian | Sicilian | Spanish |
|---|
| Apple | Malum / pomum | Poma | Pomme | Mela\pomo | Poumme | Maçã / Pomo | Poma | Mar | Mèba / Mèla | Pumu | Manzana |
| Arm | Bracchium | Braç | Bras | Braccio | Bras | Braço | Braç | Brat | Bàltzu / Bràtzu | Vrazzu | Brazo |
| Arrow | Sagitta | Fletxa | Flèche | Freccia | Èrchelle | Flecha / Seta | Sageta | Sageata | Fretza | Fileccia | Flecha / Saeta |
| Bed | Lectus | Llit | Lit | Letto | Liet | Leito / Cama | Lièch | Pat | Létu | Lettu | Lecho / Cama |
| Black | Nigrum | Negre | Noir | Nero | Nièr | Preto / Negro | Negre | Negru | Niédu | Nìuru / nìguru | Negro |
| Book | Liber | Llibre | Livre | Libro | Livre | Livro | Libre | Carte | Líberu | Libbru | Libro |
| Breast | Pectus | Pit | Poitrine | Petto | Estonma | Peito | | Piept | Pétus | Pettu | Pecho |
| Cat | Feles | Gat | Chat | Gatto | Cat | Gato | Cat | Pisica | Bàtu | Gattu / Ghiattu / Jattu / 'Attu | Gato |
| Chair | Sella | Cadira | Chaise | Sedia | Tchaîse | Cadeira | Cadièira | Scaun | Cadíra | Seggia | Silla |
| Cold | Frigus | Fred | Froid | Freddo | Fraid | Frio | Freg | Frig | Frídu | Friddu | Frío |
| Cow | Vacca | Vaca | Vache | Mucca / Vacca | Vaque | Vaca | Vaca | Vaca | Vaca | Vacca | Vaca |
| Day | Dies | Dia | Jour | Giorno | Jour | Dia | Jorn | Zi | Dí | Jornu | Día |
| Dead | Mortuus | Mort | Mort | Morto | Mort | Morto | Mort | Mort | Mórtu | Mortu | Muerto |
| Die | Morior | Morir | Mourir | Morire | Mouothi | Morrer | Morir | Muri | Mòrrere | Muriri / Mòriri | Morir |
| Family | Familia | Família | Famille | Famiglia | Famil'ye | Família | Familha | Familie | Familla | Famigghia / Famiggia | Familia |
| Finger | Digitus | Dit | Doigt | Dito | Dé | Dedo | Det | Deget | Dídu | Jìditu | Dedo |
| Flower | Flos | Flor | Fleur | Fiore | Flieur | Flor | Flor | Floare | Flore | Ciuri | Flor |
| Give | Dono | Donar | Donner | Dare | Donner / Bailli | Dar | Donar | Da | Dàe | Dari / Dunari | Dar |
| Go | Eo | Anar | Aller | Andare | Aller | Ir | Anar | Merge | Annae | Jiri | Ir |
| Gold | Aurum | Or | Or | Oro | Or | Ouro | Aur | Aur | Òru | Oru | Oro |
| Hand | Manus | Mà | Main | Mano | Main | Mão | Man | Mâna | Mànu | Manu | Mano |
| High | Altus | Alt | Haut | Alto | Haut | Alto | Aut | Înalt | Atu | Autu | Alto |
| House | Domus | Casa | Maison | Casa | Maîson | Casa | Casa | Casa | Dómu | Casa | Casa |
| I | Ego | Jo | Je | Io | | Eu | Ieu | Eu | Dèu | Iu / Eu / Jù / Jò / Jini | Yo |
| Ink | Atramentum | Tinta | Encre | Inchiostro | Encre | Tinta | Tencha | Cerneala | Tínta | Inga | Tinta |
| January | Januarius | Gener | Janvier | Gennaio | Janvyi | Janeiro | Genièr | Ianuarie | Bennàrzu | Jinnaru | Enero |
| Juice | Sucus | Suc | Jus | Succo | Jus | Suco / Sumo | Suc | Suc | Sutzu | Sucu | Jugo |
| Key | Clavis | Clau | Clé | Chiave | Clié | Chave | Clau | Cheie | Crae | Chiavi / Ciavi | Llave |
| Man | Homo | Home | Homme | Uomo | Houmme | Homem | Òme | Om | Ómine | Omu / Òminu | Hombre |
| Moon | Luna | Lluna | Lune | Luna | Leune | Lua | Luna | Luna | Lúna | Luna | Luna |
| Night | Nox | Nit | Nuit | Notte | Niet | Noite | Nuèch | Noapte | Noti | Notti | Noche |
| Old | Vetus | Vell | Vieux | Vecchio | Vyi | Velho | Vièlh | Vechi / Batrân | Vedústus | Vecchiu / Vecciu | Viejo |
| One | Unus | Un | Un | Uno | Ieune | Um | Un | Unu | Unu | Unu | Un / Uno |
| Pear | Pirum | Pera | Poire | Pera | Paithe | Pêra | Pera | Para | Píra | Piru | Pera |
| Play | Ludo | Jugar | Jouer | Giocare | Jouer | Jogar | Jogar | Juca | Zogàe | Jucari | Jugar |
| Ring | Anelus | Anell | Anneau | Anello | Anné / Bague | Anel | Anèl | Inel | Anédu | Anneddu | Anillo |
| River | Flumen | Riu | Fleuve | Fiume | Riviéthe | Rio | Riu | Râu / Rîu | Frúmene | Ciumi | Río |
| Sew | Consuo | Cosir | Coudre | Cucire | Couôtre | Coser | Cóser | Coase | Cosíe | Cùsiri | Coser |
| Snow | Nix | Neu | Neige | Neve | Né | Neve | Nèu | Nea / Zapada | Ní | Nivi | Nieve |
| Take | Capio | Agafar | Prendre | Prendere | Prendre | Tomar / Colher / Agarrar | Préner | Lua | Pígae | Pigghiari | Tomar |
| That | Ille | Aquell | Quel | Quello | Chu | Aquele | Aquel | Acel/Acela | Cúde | Chiddu | Aquél |
| The | - | el/la/ho | le/la | il/la | lé/la | o/a | lo/la | -ul/-a | su/sa | lu/la | el/la/lo |
| Throw | Jacio | Llençar | Jeter | Gettare | Pitchi | Lançar / Atirar | Lançar | Arunca | Vetàe | Jittari | Lanzar / Echar /Tirar |
| Thursday | dies Jovis | Dijous | Jeudi | Giovedì | Jeudi | Quinta-feira | Dijòus | Joi | Zóvia | Jovi / Juvidìa | Jueves |
| Tree | Arbor | Arbre | Arbre | Albero | Bouais | Árvore | Arbre | Arbore / Pom / Copac | Àrvule | Àrvuru | Árbol |
| Two | Duo | Dos/Dues | Deux | Due | Deux | Dois / Duas | Dos | Doi | Dúos / Duus | Dui | Dos |
| Urn | Urna | Urna | Urne | Urna | | Urna | | Urna | Úrna | Urna | Urna |
| Voice | Vox | Veu | Voix | Voce | Vouaix | Voz | Votz | Voce | Voge | Vuci | Voz |
| Where | Ubi / Unde / Quo | On | Où | Dove | Ioù / Où'est | Onde / U | Ont | Unde | Àba / Unde / Innói | Unni | Donde |
| White | Albus | Blanc | Blanc | Bianco | Blianc | Branco | Blanc | Alb | Àbru | Vrancu / Biancu / Jancu | Blanco |
| Who | Quis / Quæ | Qui | Qui | Chi | Tchi | Quem | Quau | Cine | Chíne | Cui / Cu' | Quien |
| World | Mundus | Món | Monde | Mondo | Monde | Mundo | Mond | Lume | Mundu | Munnu | Mundo |
| Yellow | Flavus | Groc | Jaune | Giallo | Jaune | Amarelo | Jaune | Galben | Grogu | Giarnu | Amarillo |
|
List of languages
The following is a listing of the Romance languages and some of their dialects. The classification of Romance languages is inherently difficult, since most of the linguistic area is a continuum. Top level groups are listed roughly West to East.
- Western Romance
- Iberian Romance
- Galician-Portuguese
- Galician: 3 million in Galicia.
- Fala: 10,000 Spain.
- Portuguese: 230 million Portugal, Brazil; a few thousand Asia; 26 million Africa.
- Dialects in Brazil:
- Dialects in Africa:
- Dialects in Angola
- Benguelense
- Luandense
- Sulista
- Capeverdean Portuguese
- Guinean Portuguese
- Mozambican Portuguese
- São Tomean Portuguese
- Dialects in Portugal:
- Açoriano
- Alentejano
- Algarvio
- Alto-Minhoto
- Baixo-Beirão e Alto-Alentejano
- Beirão
- Estremenho
- Madeirense
- Nortenho
- Transmontano
- Judaeo-Portuguese: extinct.
- Astur-Leonese
- Asturian language
- Leonese
- Extremaduran
- Mirandese: 5,000 Portugal.
- Spanish : 360 million Spain, Americas.
- Dialects in Spain:
- Andalusian Spanish
- Canarian Spanish
- Churro Spanish
- Murcian Spanish
- Northern Spanish
- Other dialects:
- Dialects in Americas:
- Amazonian Spanish
- Andean Spanish
- Antioqueño Spanish
- Camba Spanish
- Caribbean Spanish
- Cuban Spanish
- Dominican Spanish
- Panamanian Spanish
- Puerto Rican Spanish
- Venezuelan Spanish
- Maracucho Spanish
- Central American Spanish
- Chilean Spanish
- Cundiboyacense Spanish
- Ecuatorial Spanish
- Mexican Spanish
- North Mexican Spanish
- South Mexican Spanish
- New Mexican Spanish
- Paraguayan Spanish
- Peruvian Coast Spanish
- Rioplatense Spanish
- Santandereano-Tachirense Spanish
- Yucateco Spanish
- Riverense Portuñol: about 100,000 in Uruguay and Southern Brazil.
- Gallo Romance
- Occitan-Catalan
- Catalan: 6.5 million Spain, France, Andorra, Italy.
- Occitan: 2 million France:
- Gascon: Bordeaux country
- Aranese: One county in Catalonia
- Lengadocian: Toulouse country
- Provençal: Marseilles country
- Niçard: Nice was historically Languedocien, but became Provençal after immigration in the 19th century
- Aupenc
- Occitan de las Valadas: Piedmont western valleys
- Lemosin: Limoges country
- Auvernhat
- Franco-Provençal: Lyons country , Aosta Valley, some valleys in Piedmont
- Rhaetian languages
...
,
Argentina,
Canada,
Australia, etc.
- Oïl languages:
- Poitevin-Saintongeais
- Bourguignon-Morvandiau
- Champenois
- Franc-Comtois
- Lorrain:
- French: 70 million Europe; 12 million Americas.
