Romance language

The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family.

The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are:
* Spanish (489 million): official language in Spain, Mexico, Equatorial Guinea, the SADR, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and most of Central and South America
* French (310 million): official in 26 countries
* Portuguese (240 million): official in Portugal, Brazil, Portuguese-speaking Africa, Timor-Leste and Macau
* Italian (67 million): official in Italy, Vatican City, San Marino, Switzerland; minority language in Croatia; regional in Slovenia (Istria) and Brazil ( Santa Teresa, Espírito Santo and Encantado, Rio Grande do Sul)
* Romanian (25 million): official in Romania, Moldova and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia; minority language in Hungary, the rest of Serbia and Ukraine.
The Romance languages spread throughout the world owing to the period of European colonialism beginning in the 15th century; there are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and parts of Africa. Portuguese, French and Spanish also have many non-native speakers and are in widespread use as lingua francas. There are also numerous regional Romance languages and dialects. All of the five most widely spoken Romance languages are also official languages of the European Union (with France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain being part of it).

Name and languages

The term '' Romance'' derives from the Vulgar Latin adverb , "in Roman", derived from : for instance, in the expression , "to speak in Roman" (that is, the Latin vernacular), contrasted with , "to speak in Latin" (Medieval Latin, 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). From this adverb the noun ''romance'' originated, which applied initially to anything written , or "in the Roman vernacular".

Most of the Romance-speaking area in Europe has traditionally been a dialect continuum, where the speech variety of a location differs only slightly from that of a neighboring location, but over a longer distance these differences can accumulate to the point where two remote locations speak what may be unambiguously characterized as separate languages. This makes drawing language boundaries difficult, and thus there is no unambiguous way to divide the Romance varieties into individual languages. Even the criterion of mutual intelligibility can become ambiguous when it comes to determining whether two language varieties belong to the same language or not.

The following is a list of groupings of Romance languages, with some languages chosen to exemplify each grouping. Not all languages are listed, and the groupings should not be interpreted as well-separated genetic clades in a tree model:
* Ibero-Romance: Portuguese, Galician, Asturleonese (including Mirandese), Castilian (Spanish), Aragonese, Judaeo-Spanish;
* Occitano-Romance: Catalan/Valencian, Occitan
* Gallo-Romance: Oïl languages (including French), Franco-Provençal (Arpitan);
* Rhaeto-Romance: Romansh, Ladin, Friulian;
* Cisalpine: Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Emilian, Romagnol;
* Venetian (classification disputed);
* Central Romance: Italian ( Tuscan, Corsican, Sassarese, Central Italian), Sicilian/ Extreme Southern Italian, Neapolitan/ Southern Italian, Dalmatian (extinct in 1898), Istriot;
* Eastern Romance: Daco-Romanian (Romanian), Macedo-Romanian (Aromanian), Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian;
* Southern Romance: African (extinct since the Late Middle Ages), Sardinian ( Campidanese, Logudorese);
* Southern Lucanian (classification disputed);

Modern status

The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries.
In Europe, at least one Romance language is official in France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Romania, Moldova, Monaco, Andorra, San Marino and Vatican City. In these countries, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Romansh and Catalan have constitutional official status.

French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of the European Union. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan were the official languages of the defunct Latin Union; and French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the United Nations. Outside Europe, French, Portuguese and Spanish are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that emerged from the respective colonial empires.

With almost 500 million speakers worldwide, Spanish is an official language in Spain and in nine countries of South America, home to about half that continent's population; in six countries of Central America (all except Belize); and in Mexico. In the Caribbean, it is official in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. In all these countries, 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 and the SADR, a partially recognized state. Spanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973. In the 1987 constitution, Spanish was removed as an official language (replaced by English), and was listed as an optional/voluntary language along with Arabic. It is currently spoken by a minority and taught in the school curriculum.

Portuguese, in its original homeland, Portugal, is spoken by almost the entire population of 10 million. As the official language of Brazil, it is spoken by more than 200 million people, as well as in neighboring parts of eastern Paraguay and northern Uruguay. This accounts for slightly more than half the population of South America, making Portuguese the most spoken official Romance language in a single country.

Portuguese 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 native language by perhaps 16 million residents of that continent. In Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages in East Timor and Macau, while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia—some 400,000—are in Japan due to return immigration of Japanese Brazilians. In North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language, mainly immigrants from Brazil, Portugal, and other Portuguese-speaking countries and their descendants.
In Oceania, Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in East Timor. Its closest relative, Galician, has co-official status in the autonomous community of Galicia in Spain, together with Spanish.

Outside Europe, French is spoken natively most in the Canadian province of Quebec, and in parts of New Brunswick and Ontario. Canada is officially bilingual, with French and English being the official languages and government services in French theoretically mandated to be provided nationwide. 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.

Although Italy also had some colonial possessions before World War II, its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial domination. As a result, Italian outside Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia. 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 did not establish a colonial empire. The native range of Romanian includes not only the Republic of Moldova, 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) and in some villages between the Dniester and Bug rivers. As with Italian, Romanian is spoken outside of its ethnic range by immigrant communities. In Europe, Romanian-speakers form about two percent of the population in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Romanian is also spoken in Israel 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 in Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, and Greece.
Flavio Biondo was the first scholar to have observed (in 1435) linguistic affinities between the Romanian and Italian languages, as well as their common Latin origin.

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 in the Hispanophones)
* Portuguese 26% (230 million, plus 30 million L2 for 260 million in the Lusophones)
* French 9% (80 million, plus 230 million L2 for 310 million in the Francophones)
* Italian 7% (65 million, plus 3 million L2)
* Romanian 3% (24 million)
* Catalan 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, 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 three million 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 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, ranging from "vulnerable" (e.g. Sicilian and Venetian) 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

Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Roman 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.

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 Latin at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. The colonial empires established by Portugal, Spain, and France 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; and ''superstratum'' from later Germanic or Slavic invasions), the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin. However, some notable differences exist 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.
By most measures, Sardinian and Italian are the least divergent languages from Latin, while French has changed the most. However, all Romance languages are closer to each other than to classical Latin.

Vulgar Latin

Documentary evidence about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research is limited, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers, and more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. In Western Europe, Latin gradually replaced Celtic 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.

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 (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. With the rise of the Roman Empire, spoken Latin spread first throughout Italy and then through southern, western, central, and southeastern Europe, and northern Africa along parts of western Asia.

Latin reached a stage when innovations became generalised around the sixth and seventh centuries. After that time and within two hundred years, it became a dead language since "the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them." By the eighth and ninth centuries Latin gave way to Romance.

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 were occupied by Germanic and Slavic tribes, as well as by Huns.

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 Moselle Romance in Germany). But the Germanic tribes that had penetrated Roman Italy, Gaul, and Hispania 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 started with the Goths and continued with Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Slavs, Pechenegs, Hungarians and Cumans. The invasions of Slavs were the most thoroughgoing, and they partially reduced the Romanic element in the Balkans. The invasion of the Turks and conquest of Constantinople in 1453 marked the end of the empire.

The surviving local Romance languages were Dalmatian and Common Romanian.

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 that of 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'', 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, holding that "Latin of his age was by classical standards intolerably corrupt", successfully imposed Classical Latin as an artificial written vernacular for Western Europe. 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 , 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 lects had split apart enough to be able to speak of separate Gallo-Romance, Ibero-Romance, Italo-Romance and Eastern Romance languages. 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 rapidly broke down, leading to the total disappearance of the Western Roman Empire by the end of the century. During the period between the 5th–10th centuries AD Romance vernaculars documentation is scarce as the normal writing language used was Medieval Latin, with vernacular writing only beginning in earnest in the 11th or 12th century. The earliest such texts are the Indovinello Veronese from the eight century and the Oaths of Strasbourg from the second half of the ninth century.

Recognition of the vernaculars

From the 10th century onwards, some local vernaculars developed a written form 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 others, such as Italy, 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. 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.

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 lects, 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

Along with Latin and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, the Romance languages make up the Italic branch of the Indo-European family. Identifying subdivisions of the Romance languages is inherently problematic, because most of the linguistic area is a dialect continuum, and in some cases political biases can come into play. A tree model is often used, but the selection of criteria results in different trees. Most classification schemes are, implicitly or not, historical and geographic, resulting in groupings such as Ibero- and Gallo-Romance. A major division can be drawn between Eastern and Western Romance, separated by the La Spezia-Rimini line.

The main subfamilies that have been proposed by Ethnologue within the various classification schemes for Romance languages are:
* Italo-Western, the largest group, which includes languages such as Galician, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and French.
* Eastern Romance, which includes Romanian and closely related languages.
* Southern Romance, which includes Sardinian and Corsican (even if Corsican is considered by some linguists to be a form of Tuscan, so Italo-Western). 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).

Ranking by distance

Another approach involves attempts to rank the distance of Romance languages from each other or from their common ancestor (i.e. ranking languages based on how conservative or innovative they are, although the same language may be conservative in some respects while innovative in others). By most measures, French is the most highly differentiated Romance language, although Romanian has changed the greatest amount of its vocabulary, while Italian and Sardinian have changed the least. Standard Italian can be considered a "central" language, which is generally somewhat easy to understand to speakers of other Romance languages, whereas French and Romanian are peripheral and quite dissimilar from the rest of Romance.

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, Spanish, and Portuguese origin, some of them spoken as national languages and lingua franca in former European colonies.

Creoles of French:
* Antillean (French Antilles, Saint Lucia, Dominica; majority native language)
* French Guianese (native language of French Guiana)
* Haitian (one of Haiti's two official languages and majority native language)
* Karipúna (regional language in Brazil)
* Louisiana (US)
* Mauritian (''lingua franca'' of Mauritius)
* Réunion (native language of Réunion)
* Seychellois (Seychelles' official language)
* Tayo (regional language in New Caledonia)

Creoles of Spanish:
* Chavacano (in part of the Philippines)
* Palenquero (in part of Colombia)

Creoles of Portuguese:
* Angolar (regional language in São Tomé and Príncipe)
* Cape Verdean (Cape Verde's national language and lingua franca; includes several distinct varieties)
* Daman and Diu Creole (regional language in India)
* Forro (regional language in São Tomé and Príncipe)
* Guinea-Bissau Creole (Guinea-Bissau's national language and lingua franca)
* Kristang (Malaysia and Singapore)
* Kristi (regional language in India)
* Macanese (Macau)
* Papiamento ( Dutch Antilles official language, majority native 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 languages.

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 (which mirrors Welsh), Breathanach (mirrors Irish), Wenedyk (mirrors Polish), Þrjótrunn (mirrors Icelandic), and Helvetian (mirrors German).

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. "towards", "at, near (a person)"), conjunctions ( "but"), demonstratives (e.g. "that (over there)", "this"), and nominative singular noun forms, especially of neuter nouns (e.g. "milk", "honey", "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. *, *, *).

Final ''-m'' was dropped in Vulgar Latin. Even in Classical Latin, final , , ( inflectional suffixes of the accusative case) were often elided in poetic meter, suggesting the 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 < ''quem'' "whom", French "anything" < ''rem'' "thing"; note especially French and Catalan < ''meum'' "my (m.sg.)" which are derived from monosyllabic > *, whereas Spanish disyllabic and Portuguese and Catalan monosyllabic are derived from disyllabic > *.

As a result, only the following final consonants occurred in Vulgar Latin:
* Final in third-person singular verb forms, and (later reduced in many languages to ''-n'') in third-person plural verb forms.
* Final (including ) in a large number of morphological endings (verb endings , , ; nominative singular ; plural ) and certain other words ( "three", "six", "tomorrow", etc.).
* Final in some monosyllables (often from earlier ).
* Final , in some prepositions (e.g. , ), which were clitics that attached phonologically to the following word.
* Very occasionally, final , e.g. Occitan "yes" < ''hoc'', Old French

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