Romance languages

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Image:Map-Romance Language World.png 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.

Contents

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History

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Vulgar Latin

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 Template:IPA and Template:IPA.

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Fall of the Empire

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.

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Latent incubation

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.

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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 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.

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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 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.

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History of the name

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)<ref name=Ilari>Template:Cite book</ref>. From this adverb originated the noun romance, which applied initially to anything written in a romanice loqui.

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Status

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.

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Linguistic features

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Features inherited from Indo-European

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:

  • 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 the action, such as time, completedness 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 (unlike Arabic and Hebrew, for example).
  • Tone (voice pitch) is used only at the sentence level, e.g. to indicate surprise or interrogation (unlike Chinese and Yorùbá, for example, where pitch changes the meaning of words).
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Features inherited from 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.
  • They all have retained at least three of Latin's verbal tenses: present, e.g. DĪCIT "he says", past perfect DĪXIT "he said", past imperfect DĪCEBAT "he was saying".
  • For each tense, there are usually six distinct verbal inflections, encoding each of the three persons (I, you, he/she/it) and two numbers (singular and plural) of the subject.
  • They all had originally two copula verbs, derived from the Latin STARE (mostly used for "temporary state") and ESSE (mostly used for "essential attributes"). However, the distinction was eventually lost in some languages, notably French, which now have only the first copula.
  • 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 letter K is rarely used in Romance languages — mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words, as it was in Latin.
  • In the case of standard Italian, the Greco-Latin stressed pronunciation of double consonants is preserved.
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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.

  • There are no declensions, that is, nouns are no longer altered to indicate their grammatical roles. (An exception is Romanian, which retains a combined genitive/dative case. Also, Old French initially had an oblique case.)
  • There are only two grammatical genders, having lost the neuter gender of Classical Latin.
  • 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 (e.g. the use of accusative plus infinitive in indirect discourse and the use of the ablative absolute) were dropped in favour of constructions with subordinate clauses.
  • There are definite and indefinite grammatical articles, derived from Latin demonstratives and the numeral UNUS ("one").
  • The Latin future tense was replaced by new synthetic future and conditional tenses, based on infinitive + present or imperfect tense of HABERE ("to have"), fused to form new inflections.
  • Most Latin synthetic perfect tenses were lost, generally replaced by new compound forms with "to be" or "to have" + past participle.
  • 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 than the rest.
  • Many Latin combining prefixes were incorporated in the lexicon as new roots and verb stems, e.g. Italian estrarre ("to extract") from Latin EX- ("out") and TRAHERE ("to drag").
  • The Latin letters C and G — which usually sound like Template:IPA and Template:IPA — have other sounds when they come before E and I. (See below.)
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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 (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:

  • 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 or the tu/Lei contrast in Italian.
  • 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 (originally the Semitic version of I, which in time acquired various sounds in different languages).
  • 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 characters.
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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 (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.

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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 Template:IPA and lune Template:IPA. 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..

Sonds 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").

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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 Template:IPA ("Pope") and papà Template:IPA ("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 Template:IPA ("let's put some of it in there") or Spanish entregándomelo Template:IPA ("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.

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Formation of plurals

Some Romance languages form plurals by adding Template:IPA (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 Template:IPA). See La Spezia-Rimini Line for more information.

  • Plural in Template:IPA: Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian.
  • Vowel change: Italian, Romanian.
  • No marking: French (formerly marked with Template:IPA, but this has been lost in the spoken language; plural marking is now indicated on the associated determiner rather than the noun itself)
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Borrowed words

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Derivations

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Words for "more"

Some Romance languages use a version of Latin plus, others a version of magis.

  • Plus-derived: French plus Template:IPA, Italian più Template:IPA, dialectal Catalan pus Template:IPA (this word is exclusively used on negative statements in Mallorcan Catalan), Romansh
  • Magis-derived: Portuguese (mais, mediaeval Galician-Portugueses retained both versions: mais and chus), Spanish (más), Catalan (més), Occitan (mai), Romanian (mai), Italian (mai, used only in the construction non... mai, meaning "never")
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Words for "nothing"

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".

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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, Franco-Provençal sèze, Occitan setze, Sardinian sédichi.
  • "Ten and six": Portuguese dezasseis or dezesseis, Spanish dieciséis.
  • "Six over ten": Romanian şaisprezece (where spre derives from Latin super).

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.

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To have and to hold

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:

  • TTH: Portuguese/Galician.
  • THH: Spanish, Catalan.
  • HHH: Occitan, French.
  • HHE: Romanian, Italian

For example:

Portuguese: (eu) tenho, (eu) tenho feito, há (TTH)
Spanish: (yo) tengo, (yo) he hecho, hay (THH)
French: j'ai, j'ai fait, il y a (HHH)
Italian: (io) ho, (io) ho fatto, c'è (HHE)
Romanian: (eu) am, (eu) am făcut, este (HHE)

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").

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To have or to be

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.

  • "Have" only: Catalan, Spanish, Romanian, Sicilian.
  • "Have" and "be": Occitan, French, Italian.

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).

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I did or I have done

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.

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Writing systems

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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 (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 Template:IPA and Template:IPA — have other sounds when they come before E and I. This is due to a general palatalization or affrication of the Template:IPA and Template:IPA sounds before front vowels, like Template:IPA and Template:IPA, 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:

C: generally Template:IPA, but "softened" before E or I in all languages — to Template:IPA in French, Portuguese and Catalan, Template:IPA in Italian and Romanian, Template:IPA or Template:IPA in Spanish.
G: generally Template:IPA or Template:IPA, but "softened" before E or I in all languages — to Template:IPA in French, Portuguese and Catalan, to Template:IPA in Italian and Romanian, to Template:IPA in Spanish.
H: silent in French, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese; pronounced as Template:IPA in Romanian. Used in various digraphs (see below).
J: pronounced Template:IPA in most languages; Template:IPA in Spanish; Template:IPA in Sicilian and Italian, but normally replaced with I in native Italian words.
Q: always used before U. (See below.)
S: usually Template:IPA between vowels in Italian, French, Portuguese and Catalan. In Spanish, Template:IPA between vowels.
W: used only in Walloon language. Pronounced Template:IPA in French, with the exception of words borrowed from English.
X: normally Template:IPA in Old Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, but also Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA and Template:IPA, in loan words from Latin or Greek, and in French. Either Template:IPA or Template:IPA or Template:IPA in Spanish. Not used in Italian. Either Template:IPA or Template:IPA in Romanian.
Y: used in French and Spanish as a vowel Template:IPA, and in Spanish also as a consonant Template:IPA, Template:IPA or Template:IPA.
Z: either Template:IPA or Template:IPA in Italian; Template:IPA or Template:IPA in Spanish; Template:IPA in most of the other languages.

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.

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Digraphs and trigraphs

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:

CH: used in Italian and Romanian to get the Template:IPA sound before E or I; for Template:IPA in Spanish; for Template:IPA in most other languages.
ÇH: used in Poitevin-Saintongeais for voiceless palatal fricative Template:IPA
DD: used in Sicilian for Template:IPA.
DJ: used in Walloon for Template:IPA.
GI: used in Italian and Romanian to get the Template:IPA sound before A, O, or U.
GH: used in Italian and Romanian to get the Template:IPA sound before E or I; not used in other languages.
GL: used in Italian for Template:IPA.
GN: used in French and Italian for Template:IPA, as in champignon or gnocchi.
GU: used before E or I for the sound Template:IPA or Template:IPA, in all Romance except Italian, Romanian and some standards of Norman.
JH: used in Poitevin-Saintongeais for aspirated Template:IPA.
LH: used in Portuguese and Aranese for Template:IPA.
LL: used in Spanish, Catalan, Norman and Dgèrnésiais, originally for Template:IPA but often pronounced Template:IPA, Template:IPA. Pronounced either Template:IPA or Template:IPA, in French.
L·L: used in Catalan for a long Template:IPA.
NH: used in Portuguese and Aranese for Template:IPA.
NY: used in Catalan for Template:IPA.
QU: used before E or I for Template:IPA, in all Romance except Italian, Romanian and some varieties of Norman.
RR: used between vowels in several languages to denote a guttural R (trilled Template:IPA in Spanish and Italian) instead of simple Template:IPA.
SC: used before E or I in Italian for Template:IPA, and in French and Spanish as etymological alternate to Template:IPA.
SCI: used in Italian for Template:IPA before A, O, or U.
SH: used in Aranese for Template:IPA
SS: used in Italian, French, Portuguese and Catalan for Template:IPA between vowels.
TH: used in Jèrriais for Template:IPA (as in English "thick"); used in Aranese for either Template:IPA or Template:IPA

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 Template:IPA or Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA and Template:IPA, 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 Template:IPA ("notes") vs notte Template:IPA ("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 Template:IPA, SS'S is a long Template:IPA, T'T is a long Template:IPA.

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Diacritics and special characters

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.

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Punctuation and spacing

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Upper and lower case

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.

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Italic and Boldface

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 thse can be printed in "boldface" (with thicker strokes, understood as a louder and more forceful tone) for stronger emphasis.

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List of languages

The following is a listing of the Romance languages and some of their dialects. Since the classification of Romance languages is still controversial, the listing records only the groupings that are accepted by most linguists. Top level groups are listed roughly West to East. Within each group, the sub-groups and languages are listed in alphabetical order. Nesting below a single language is used only for true dialects — meaning languages that were definitely derived from that parent language only, well after the parent came into existence. So, for example, the American variants of Spanish are listed under Spanish; whereas Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician are listed at the same level. Ditto for the so-called "Italian dialects," which were derived directly from Vulgar Latin and not from standard Italian.

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Mixed languages

There are some languages that developed from a mixture of two established Romance languages. It is not always clear whether they should be classified as pidgins, creole languages, or mixed languages.

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Proposed subfamilies

Here are some of the subfamiles that have been proposed within the various classification schemes for Romance languages:

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Pidgins and creoles

The global spread of colonial Romance languages has given rise to numerous creole languages and pidgins. Some of the lesser-spoken languages have also had influences on varieties spoken far from their traditional regions. The following is a partial list of creole languages and pidgins, grouped by their main source language.

While not being pidgins nor creoles, English (see Middle English creole hypothesis), Basque and Albanian have a substantial Romance influence in their vocabularies.

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Constructed languages

Latin and the Romance languages also give rise to numerous constructed languages, both international auxiliary languages (such as Interlingua, Latino sine flexione, Occidental, and Lingua Franca Nova) and languages created for artistic purposes only (such as Brithenig and Wenedyk).

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See also

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External links

Template:Link FAals:Romanische Sprachen ar:لغة رومانسية az:Roman qrupu bg:Романски езици bs:Romanski jezici zh-min-nan:Romance gí-giân ca:Llengües romàniques cs:Románské jazyky da:Romanske sprog de:Romanische Sprachen et:Romaani keeled el:Ρομανικές γλώσσες es:Lenguas romances eo:Latinida lingvo eu:Hizkuntz erromantze fr:Langues romanes fur:Lenghis romanzis ko:로망스어군 io:Latinida linguo it:Lingue romanze he:שפות רומאניות kw:Romanek la:Linguae Romanae lt:Romanų kalbos li:Roemaanse taole mk:Романски јазици nl:Romaanse talen ja:ロマンス語 no:Romanske språk pl:Języki romańskie pt:Línguas românicas ro:Limbile romanice rm:Linguas romanas ru:Романские языки se:Románalaš gielat sc:Limbas Romanzas simple:Romance languages sk:Románske jazyky sl:Romanski jeziki fi:Romaaniset kielet sv:Romanska språk vi:Nhóm ngôn ngữ Rôman uk:Романські мови wa:Lingaedjes romans zh:罗曼语族

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