Romance languages

The Romance languages are a group of languages that all come from old Latin. They are part of the big Indo-European language family. Today, many people around the world speak these languages.

The five most popular Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Spanish is mainly spoken in Spain, Equatorial Guinea, and many countries in Hispanic America. Portuguese is the main language in Portugal and Brazil. French is used in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, and Haiti. Italian is spoken in Italy and a few other places. Romanian is mainly spoken in Romania and Moldova.

These languages spread around the world because of European exploration and rule that began in the 1400s. Today, many people speak Romance languages as their first language, especially in the Americas, Europe, and parts of Africa. French, Spanish, and Portuguese are also commonly learned by people who speak other languages.

Name and languages

The word Romance comes from an old Latin way of speaking called romanice, meaning "in Roman." This was different from formal Latin used for writing and from languages of people outside the Roman Empire.

Many areas in Europe speak Romance languages. These languages change slowly from one place to another, making it hard to say where one language ends and another begins. Some groups of Romance languages include:

• Ibero-Romance: Portuguese, Galician, Asturleonese (including Mirandese), Spanish, Aragonese, Judaeo-Spanish
• Occitano-Romance: Catalan/Valencian, Occitan
• Gallo-Romance: Oïl languages (including French), Franco-Provençal (Arpitan)
• Rhaeto-Romance: Romansh, Ladin, Friulian
• Gallo-Italic: Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Emilian, Romagnol
• Venetian
• Central Romance: Italian (Tuscan, Corsican, Sassarese), Sicilian, Neapolitan
• Eastern Romance: Daco-Romanian (Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian
• Southern Romance: Sardinian (Campidanese, Logudorese)

Modern status

Main articles: Romance-speaking Europe, Latin America, and Latin Union

The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish. Other common Romance languages are Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian. These languages are spoken in many places in Europe and the world. They are official languages in many 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.

Spanish is an official language in Spain and several countries in South America. It is also official in Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Portuguese is the official language of Portugal and Brazil, and also of some African countries. French is official in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Haiti, and many African nations. Italian is mainly spoken in Italy and Switzerland. Romanian is spoken mostly in Romania and Moldova.

History

Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Roman Empire helped make Latin the main language in Western Europe. Latin also reached places like southeastern Britain, the Roman province of Africa, western Germany, Pannonia, and the Balkans.

As the empire grew weaker and split apart, different kinds of Latin began to change. The western areas were influenced by tribes like the Goths and Franks, while eastern areas felt influence from Slavic groups. Over time, these changes created many new languages. The empires of Portugal, Spain, and France later spread their languages around the world, so today many Romance language speakers live outside of Europe.

Even with different influences, all Romance languages come from Vulgar Latin. They have dropped some Latin rules but still share many similarities. Some, like Sardinian and Italian, stay closer to Latin, while French has changed more.

Samples

Romance languages share many words and ways of speaking because they all come from Latin. For example, they often use similar words to say things like "She always closes the window before she dines."

Some words change their meaning over time. The Portuguese word fresta comes from the Latin word for "window," but now it means "skylight" or "slit." Other languages might have words that sound similar but are rarely used or no longer exist.

Different languages sometimes use different words for the same idea, even if they sound similar. This shows how each language has its own special way of speaking.

Classification and related languages

Main article: Classification of Romance languages

The Romance languages are part of the Italic branch of the Indo-European family. They come from Latin and a few older languages of Italy. It can be hard to sort these languages into groups because they change slowly over areas.

The main groups of Romance languages are:

• Italo-Western, which includes languages like Galician, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and French.
• Eastern Romance, which includes Romanian and similar languages.
• Southern Romance, which includes Sardinian and Corsican.

Some Romance languages have mixed with other languages and created new ones, called creoles. There are many French, Spanish, and Portuguese creoles spoken in places like Haiti, Mauritius, and Cape Verde.

Latin and Romance languages have inspired many made-up languages. Other examples include Interlingue-Occidental, Interlingua, and Lingua Franca Nova.

Sound changes

Main article: Phonological changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance

See also: Vulgar Latin

Consonants

Significant sound changes affected the consonants of the Romance languages.

Apocope

There was a tendency to drop final consonants in Vulgar Latin, either by removing them (apocope) or adding a vowel after them (epenthesis).

Many final consonants were rare, occurring only in certain words. These words were often replaced, and nouns changed their forms to avoid the final consonants.

Final -m was dropped in Vulgar Latin. In Classical Latin, final -am, -em, -um were often elided in poetic meter, suggesting the m was not strongly pronounced. As a result, only a few final consonants remained in Vulgar Latin:

• Final -t in verb forms, and -nt in plural verb forms.
• Final -s in many endings and some other words.
• Final -n in some short words.
• Final -r, -d in some prepositions.
• Very occasionally, final -c, as in Occitan oc "yes".

In Italo-Romance and the Eastern Romance languages, most final consonants were lost or protected by adding a vowel, except for some articles and prepositions. Modern Standard Italian has few words ending in consonants, but Romanian has regained them.

Central Western Romance languages regained many final consonants through the loss of final /e/ and /o/.

Palatalization

Main article: Palatalization in the Romance languages

In Romance languages, 'palatalization' describes how certain sounds changed when they came before a front vowel.

Lenition

Stop consonants changed by lenition in Vulgar Latin in some areas.

The voiced labial consonants /b/ and /w/ developed a fricative [β] between vowels. In many Romance languages, this later became /v/, but in others, it merged into a single sound.

Several other consonants were "softened" between vowels in Western Romance languages. The changes are as follows: Single voiceless sounds became voiced. Voiced sounds tended to disappear. The plain sibilant -s- [s] was voiced to [z] between vowels. The double sounds became single. The sound /h/ was lost but later reintroduced into some Romance languages.

Consonant length is no longer important in most Romance languages. Some languages of Italy have long consonants.

Vowel prosthesis

In Late Latin a prosthetic vowel /i/ (lowered to /e/ in most languages) was added at the start of words that began with /s/ and a consonant:

• scrībere 'to write' > Sardinian iscribere, Spanish escribir, Portuguese escrever, Catalan escriure, Old French escri(v)re (mod. écrire);
• spatha "sword" > Sard ispada, Sp/Pg espada, Cat espasa, OFr espeḍe (modern épée);
• spiritus "spirit" > Sard ispìritu, Sp espíritu, Pg espírito, Cat esperit, French esprit;
• Stephanum "Stephen" > Sard Istèvene, Sp Esteban, Cat Esteve, Pg Estêvão, OFr Estievne (mod. Étienne);
• status "state" > Sard istadu, Sp/Pg estado, Cat estat, OFr estat (mod. état).

While Western Romance words combined the added vowel with the word, Eastern Romance and southern Italo-Romance did not. In Italian, the rules were preserved by using vowel-final articles.

One big change affected Vulgar Latin was the reorganisation of its vowel system. Classical Latin had five short vowels and five long vowels, each of which was a separate sound, and four diphthongs.

During the Proto-Romance period, the difference in length was lost. Vowels were pronounced long in stressed, open syllables and short elsewhere. This is still true in modern Italian.

The loss of vowel length created nine different vowel sounds, but many of these merged:

• In Sardinian, the long and short vowels merged, creating a simple five-vowel system.
• In most areas, the near-close vowels merged into the high-mid vowels, creating a seven-vowel system. This is still found in Italian and Portuguese.
• In the Eastern Romance languages (particularly, Romanian), the front vowels changed as in most languages, but the back vowels changed as in Sardinian, creating a six-vowel system. Modern Romanian has a balanced seven-vowel system.
• Sicilian has its own vowel system, but it passed through the same developments as other languages.

Further variants are found in southern Italy and Corsica. The Sardinian-type system is also found in a small region in southern Italy.

Gallurese and Sassarese belong to the southern dialects of Corsica but have a strong Logudorese Sardinian influence.

The Proto-Romance vowel-length system became a feature in the Gallo-Romance languages due to the loss of many final vowels. French developed a third vowel length system around AD 1300, but it is now mostly lost.

Latin diphthongs

The Latin diphthongs ae and oe, pronounced /aj/ and /oj/ in earlier Latin, merged into single vowels.

ae became /ɛː/ by the 1st century a.d. It merged with /ɛ/.

oe generally merged with /eː/.

au merged with ō /oː/ in the popular speech of Rome by the 1st century b.c. It was kept in most areas but developed into /o/ in many languages.

An early process in all Romance languages was metaphony (vowel mutation), similar to the umlaut process in Germanic languages. Depending on the language, certain stressed vowels were raised or diphthongized by a final /i/ or /u/ or by a following /j/.

These changes reduced or eliminated the differences between open-mid and close-mid vowels in many languages.

Nasalization

In both French and Portuguese, nasal vowels developed from vowels followed by a nasal consonant (/m/ or /n/). In French, nasal vowels before remaining nasal consonants were denasalized, but the vowels were lowered. In Portuguese, nasalization was often eliminated or the vowels were raised.

Romanian shows evidence of past nasalization phenomena.

Unstressed vowels

Originally in Proto-Romance, the same nine vowels developed in unstressed as stressed syllables.

In Sardinian, they merged into five vowels.

In Italo-Western Romance, they merged into seven vowels, but then unstressed low-mid /ɛ ɔ/ merged into the high-mid vowels /e o/, resulting in a five-vowel system in unstressed syllables.

Word-final short -u appears to have been raised to /u/.

In final unstressed syllables, most Italo-Western Romance languages show further merging, although some conservative central Italian languages preserved the original five-vowel system:

• In Tuscan (including standard Italian), /u/ merged into /o/ in final unstressed syllables.
• In the Western Romance languages, /i/ eventually merged into /e/ in final unstressed syllables. In many dialects, unstressed /o/ and /u/ merge into /u/, and unstressed /a/ and /e/ merge into /ə/. However, some dialects preserve the original five-vowel system, most notably standard Valencian.

Intertonic vowels

Intertonic vowels are word-internal unstressed vowels. They were often lost or changed. Already in Vulgar Latin intertonic vowels between a single consonant and a following /r/ or /l/ tended to drop. Many languages ultimately dropped almost all intertonic vowels.

Languages south and east of the La Spezia–Rimini Line maintained intertonic vowels, while those to the north and west dropped all except /a/. Standard Italian generally maintained intertonic vowels, but typically changed unstressed /e/ to /i/. Examples:

• septimā́nam "week" > Italian settimana, Romanian săptămână vs. Spanish/Portuguese semana, French semaine, Occitan/Catalan setmana, Piedmontese sman-a
• quattuórdecim "fourteen" > Italian quattordici, Venetian cuatòrdexe, Lombard/Piedmontese quatòrdes, vs. Spanish catorce, Portuguese/French quatorze
• metipsissimus > medipsimus /medíssimos/ ~ /medéssimos/ "self" > Italian medésimo vs. Venetian medemo, Lombard medemm, Old Spanish meísmo, meesmo (> modern mismo), Galician-Portuguese meesmo (> modern mesmo), Old French meḍisme (> later meïsme > MF mesme > modern même)
• bonitā́tem "goodness" > Italian bonità ~ bontà, Romanian bunătate but Spanish bondad, Portuguese bondade, French bonté
• collocā́re "to position, arrange" > Italian collocare vs. Spanish colgar "to hang", Romanian culca "to lie down", French coucher "to lay sth on its side; put s.o. to bed"
• commūnicā́re "to take communion" > Romanian cumineca vs. Portuguese comungar, Spanish comulgar, Old French comungier
• carricā́re "to load (onto a wagon, cart)" > Portuguese/Catalan carregar vs. Spanish/Occitan cargar "to load", French charger, Italian caricare, Lombard cargà/caregà, Venetian carigar/cargar(e) "to load", Romanian încărca
• fábricam "forge" > /*fawrɡa/ > Spanish fragua, Portuguese frágua, Occitan/Catalan farga, French forge
• disjējūnā́re "to break a fast" > *disjūnā́re > Old French disner "to have lunch" > French dîner "to dine" (but *disjū́nat > Old French desjune "he has lunch" > French (il) déjeune "he has lunch")
• adjūtā́re "to help" > Italian aiutare, Romanian ajuta but French aider, Lombard aidà/aiuttà (Spanish ayudar, Portuguese ajudar based on stressed forms, e.g. ayuda/ajuda "he helps"; cf. Old French aidier "to help" vs. aiue "he helps")

Portuguese is more conservative in maintaining some intertonic vowels other than /a/: e.g. *offerḗscere "to offer" > Portuguese oferecer vs. Spanish ofrecer, French offrir ( Spanish Esteban but Old French Estievne > French Étienne. Many cases of /a/ before the stress also ultimately dropped in French: sacraméntum "sacrament" > Old French sairement > French serment "oath".

Writing systems

Main article: Latin script

See also: Palatalization in the Romance languages § Spelling of palatalized consonants

Most Romance languages use the Latin alphabet, but they change it a little to fit their sounds. Romanian used a Cyrillic alphabet in the past because of Slavic influence. Some groups in Spain used Arabic or Hebrew scripts to write languages like Judaeo-Spanish.

Letters

The Latin alphabet was changed in a few ways to work for Romance languages. The letter V split into V and U, and I split into I and J. Letters like K and W are used only for foreign names. Portuguese and Catalan avoid foreign letters more than others.

Most letters kept their sounds, but a few changed. H and Q were used in combinations to make new sounds. Languages added marks to letters for extra sounds.

Digraphs and trigraphs

Romance languages use digraphs (two letters for one sound) and trigraphs (three letters for one sound) because they have more sounds than the Latin alphabet can show.

Diacritics

Romance languages add marks to letters (diacritics) to show different sounds, mark stress, or tell apart words that sound the same. Common diacritics include accents and tildes.

Upper and lowercase

Romance languages use both uppercase (like A) and lowercase (like a) letters. They capitalize the first word of sentences, names, and titles, but not all nouns. Months and days of the week are usually not capitalized.

Vocabulary comparison

The tables below show how words have changed from Latin to the modern Romance languages. Some words look very different now, especially in French. These changes help us see how languages grow and change over time.

Degrees of lexical similarity among the Romance languages

Data from Ethnologue: