Topic summary
Romance language
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Romance languages.
History
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 dropped the Latin inflection system, instead making extensive use of prepositions. Romance languages also normally have SVO sentence structure. 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.