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Romance
Geographic distribution:	Originally Southern Europe and parts of Northern Africa; now also Latin America, Canada, parts of Lebanon, much of Western Africa, most of Northern Africa, and parts of Horn of Africa and Southern Africa
Linguistic classification:	Indo-European Italic Romance
Proto-language:	Vulgar Latin
Subdivisions:	Western Romance (or Italo-Western) Eastern Romance Sardinian
Romance languages in the world

The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages) are all the related languages derived from Vulgar Latin and forming a subgroup of the Italic languages within the Indo-European language family. The Romance languages include Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, and many others. ^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

The Romance languages developed from Latin in the sixth to ninth centuries. Today, there are more than 800 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in Europe and the Americas and many smaller regions scattered throughout the world, as well as large numbers of non-native speakers, and widespread use as lingua franca.^[6] Because of the extreme difficulty and varying methodology of distinguishing among language, variety, and dialect, it is impossible to count the number of Romance languages now in existence, but the standard count places the number of living Romance languages at almost 25. In fact, the number may be slightly larger, and many more existed previously (SIL Ethnologue lists 47 Romance languages).

Today the six most widely spoken standardized Romance languages are Spanish (c. 329 million native), Portuguese (c. 203 million native), French (c. 68 million native speakers, another 50 million or so second-language speakers, mostly in francophone Africa), Italian (c. 62 million native), Romanian (c. 24 million native), and Catalan (c. 12 million native).^[6] Many of these languages have large numbers of non-native speakers; this is especially the case for French, in widespread use throughout West Africa as a lingua franca.

Among the numerous other Romance languages are Aragonese, Aromanian, Arpitan, Asturian, Corsican, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Friulan, Galician, Ladino, Leonese, Lombard, Mirandese, Neapolitan, Occitan, Piedmontese, Romansh, Sardinian, Sicilian, Venetian and Walloon.

Origins[link]

Romance languages are the continuation of Vulgar Latin, the popular sociolect of Latin spoken by soldiers, settlers and merchants of the Roman Empire, as distinguished from the Classical form of the language spoken by the Roman upper classes, the form in which the language was generally written. Between 350 BC and AD 150, the expansion of the 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, and the Balkans north of the Jireček Line.

During the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and collapse in the fifth century, varieties of Latin began to diverge within each local area at an accelerated rate, and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. The overseas 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 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 are overwhelmingly evolved forms of Vulgar Latin. However, there are some notable differences 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.

Name[link]

The term "Romance" comes from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice, derived from Romanicus: for instance, in the expression romanice loqui, "to speak in Roman" (that is, the Latin vernacular), contrasted with latine loqui, "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 barbarice loqui, "to speak in Barbarian" (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the Roman Empire).^[7] From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice, or "in the Roman vernacular".

The word romance with the modern sense of romance novel or love affair has the same origin. In the medieval literature of Western Europe, serious writing was usually in Latin, while popular tales, often focusing on love, were composed in the vernacular and came to be called "romances".

Samples[link]

Lexical and grammatical similarities among the Romance languages, and between Latin and each of them, are apparent from the following examples having the same meaning:

English: She always closes the window before dining.

Latin	(illa) claudit semper fenestram antequam cēnat.
Aragonese	(Ella) zarra siempre a finestra antes de cenar.
Aromanian	(Ea/Nâsa) încljidi/nkidi totna firida ninti di tsinâ.
Asturian	(Ella) pieslla siempre la feniestra/ventana enantes de cenar.
Bergamasque	(Lé) la sèra sèmper sö la finèstra prima de senà.
Bolognese	(Lî) la sèra sänper la fnèstra prémma ed dsnèr.
Catalan	(Ella) tanca sempre la finestra abans de sopar.
Corsican	Edda chjudi sempri u balconu prima di cinà.
Emilian	(Lē) la sèra sèmpar sù la fnèstra prima ad snàr.
Extremaduran	(Ella) afecha siempri la ventana antis de cenal.
Franco-Provençal	(Le) sarre toltin/tojor la fenétra avan de goutâ/dinar/sopar.
French	Elle ferme toujours la fenêtre avant de dîner/souper.
Friulan	(Jê) e siere simpri il barcon prin di cenâ.
Galician	(Ela) pecha/fecha sempre a fiestra/xanela antes de cear.
Italian	(Ella/Lei) chiude sempre la finestra prima di cenare.
Judaeo-Spanish	Eya serra syempre la ventana antes de senar.
Ladin	(Ëra) stlüj dagnora la finestra impröma de cenè. (badiot) (Ëila) stluj for l viere dan maië da cëina (gherdëina)
Leonese	(Eilla) pecha siempre la ventana primeiru de cenare.
Ligurian	(Le) saera sempre u balcun primma de cenà.
Milanese	(Le) la sara semper sü la finestra prima de disnà.
Mirandese	(Eilha) cerra siempre la bentana/jinela atrás de jantar.
Mozarabic	Ella cloudet sempre la fainestra abante da cenare. (reconstructed)
Neapolitan	Essa nzerra sempe 'a fenesta primma 'e magnà.
Norman	Lli barre tréjous la crouésie devaunt de daîner.
Occitan	(Ela) barra sempre/totjorn la fenèstra abans de sopar.
Picard	Ale frunme tojours l’ creusèe édvint éd souper.
Piedmontese	Chila a sara sèmper la fnestra dnans ëd fé sin-a/dnans ëd siné.
Portuguese	Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de jantar.
Romanian	Ea închide totdeauna fereastra înainte de a cina.
Romansh	Ella clauda/serra adina la fanestra avant ch'ella tschainia.
Sardinian	Issa serrat semper sa bentana innantis 'e chenare.
Sassarese	Edda sarra sempri lu balchoni primma di zinà.
Sicilian	Idda chiui sempri la finestra prima di pistiari/manciari.
Spanish	(Ella) siempre cierra la ventana antes de cenar.
Umbrian	Essa chjude sempre la finestra prima de cena'.
Venetian	Eła ła sara/sera sempre ła fenestra vanti de xenàr/disnar.
Walloon	Ele sere todi li finiesse divant di soper.

Some of the divergence comes from semantic change: where the same root word has developed different meanings. Portuguese, for example, has the word fresta, and Spanish fenestra/finiestra (which is a cognate of French fenêtre, Italian finestra, Romanian fereastra and so on, from Latin fenestra "window"), however it now means "skylight" and "slit" as opposed to "window." The Spanish and Portuguese terms defenestrar and defenestración/defenestração meaning "to throw through a window" or "defenestrate, defenestration", and fenestrado, "replete with windows", also have the same root (but are later derivations from Latin).

Likewise, Portuguese also has the word cear, a cognate of Italian cenare and Spanish cenar, but uses it in the sense of "to have a late supper" in most varieties, while the preferred word for "to dine" is actually jantar (related to archaic Spanish yantar "to eat") because of semantic changes in the nineteenth century. Galician has both fiestra (from medieval fẽestra which is the ultimate origin of standard Portuguese fresta), and the less frequently used ventá and xanela.

As an alternative to lei (originally the accusative form), Italian has the pronoun ella, a cognate of the other words for "she", but it is hardly ever used in speaking.

Spanish, Asturian and Leonese ventana and Mirandese and Sardinian bentana come from Latin ventus "wind" (c.f. English window, etymologically 'wind eye'), and Portuguese janela, Galician xanela, Mirandese jinela from Latin *ianuella "small opening", a derivative of ianua "door".

Sardinian balcone (alternative for bentana) comes from Old Italian and is similar to other Romance languages such as French balcon (from Italian balcone), Portuguese balcão, Romanian balcon, Spanish balcón, Catalan balcó and Corsican balconi (alternative for purtellu).

History[link]

Vulgar Latin[link]

There is a lack of documentary evidence about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize upon. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples and forced resettlers, more likely to be natives of 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 distinguish them from Classical Latin, such as the almost complete loss of the Latin case system and its replacement by prepositions; the loss of the neuter gender, comparative inflections; replacement of some verb paradigms by innovations (e.g. the synthetic future gave way to an originally analytic strategy now typically formed by infinitive + evolved present indicative forms of 'have'); the use of articles; and the initial stages of the palatalization of the plosives /k/, /g/, and /t/. Some modern languages, such as Finnish, have similar, quite sharp, differences between their printed and spoken form.

To some scholars, this suggests that the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire (from the end of 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.

Fall of the Western Roman Empire[link]

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 the Germanic and Slavic tribes, as well as by the Huns, which isolated the Vlachs from the rest of Latin Europe.

British Romance and African Romance, the forms of Vulgar Latin used in southeastern Britain and the Roman province of Africa, where it had been spoken by much of the urban population, disappeared in the Middle Ages. But the Germanic tribes that had penetrated Italy, Gaul, and Hispania eventually adopted Latin and the remnants of Roman culture, and so Latin remained the dominant language there.

Latent incubation[link]

Sometime between the fourth and the eighth centuries AD, Latin is thought to have split up into regional languages where mutual intelligibility was becoming a serious problem.^[8]:5 Clear evidence of Latin change comes from the Reichenau Glosses, an eighth century compilation of about 1,200 words from the fourth century Latin Vulgate (a Bible translation by St. Jerome) that were no longer understandable, along with their eighth century equivalents. Some examples, along with equivalents in modern Romance languages:

During the late eighth century, Charlemagne, aware that the "Latin of his age was by classical standards intolerably corrupt",^[8]:6 waged a successful campaign to restore the use of classically correct Latin. 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 rustica romana lingua, an explicit acknowledgement of the reality of the Romance languages as separate languages from Latin.^[8]:6 By this time, and possibly as early as the sixth century according to Price (1984),^[8]:6 the Romance dialects 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 in the fifth 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.^{[citation needed]} Unfortunately, the critical period between the fifth and tenth centuries AD is poorly documented because little or no writing from the chaotic "Dark Ages" of the fifth through eighth centuries has survived, and writing after that time was in consciously classicized Medieval Latin, with vernacular writing only beginning in earnest in the eleventh or twelfth centuries.

Recognition of the vernaculars[link]

Between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, 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.

Uniformization and standardization[link]

The invention of the printing press apparently slowed down the evolution of Romance languages from the sixteenth century on,^{[citation needed]} and 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.

Modern status[link]

Romance languages, twentieth century

Number of native speakers of each Romance language, as fractions of the total 690 million

The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish (Castilian), followed by Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan, all of which are official languages in at least one country. A few other languages have official status on a regional or otherwise limited level, for instance Friulan, Sardinian and Franco-Provençal in Italy; Romansh in Switzerland; and Galician in Spain.

French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of the European Union. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan are the official languages of the 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 their respective colonial empires. French is one of the official languages of Canada, many countries in Africa, and some islands in the Indian and Pacific Ocean.

Spanish is an official language of Mexico, much of South America, Central America, the islands of the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean (except in Haiti where the official languages are French and Haitian Kreyol, a French creole, and Jamaica, where English and Jamaican Patois are spoken.), and it is the official language of Equatorial Guinea in Africa and is the most spoken Romance language in the world.

Portuguese is the official language of Brazil (reaching almost 190 million, it is the language spoken by half of population of South America that resides in Brazil), five African countries (Angola, Cabo Verde, Guiné-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé e Príncipe), and East Timor and Macau in Asia and is the second most spoken Romance language.

Although Italy also had some colonial possessions, its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial domination, resulting in Italian being spoken only as a minority or secondary language by immigrant communities in North, South America, Australia, and African countries like Libya, Eritrea and Somalia. Romania did not establish a colonial empire, but the language is spoken as a native language in Moldova, while it also spread to other countries in rest of Europe, especially the other Romance countries (most notably Italy and Spain), and elsewhere such as Israel, where it is a native language to 5% of the population,^[9] and by many more as a secondary language; this is due to the large numbers of Romanian-born Jews who moved to Israel after World War II.^[10]

The total native speakers of Romance languages are divided as follows (with their ranking within the languages of the world in brackets):^[11][12]

• Spanish (Hispanosphere) 47% (2nd)
• Portuguese (Lusosphere) 26% (6th)
• French (Francophonie) 11% (11th)
• Italian 9% (18th)
• Romanian 4% (34th)
• Catalan 1% (75th)
• Others 2%

Catalan is unusual in that it is not the main language of any nation-state other than Andorra, but nonetheless has been able to compete and even gain speakers at the expense of the dominant language of its primary nation (Spanish); in fact, Catalan is probably the only minority European language whose survival is not under threat.

This is due to a strong belief that the Catalan language is a critical component of the ethnic identity of the Catalan people. This has allowed them to resist the assimilationist urges that are in the process of destroying most of the remaining minority-language communities, even those that have strong government support (e.g. Irish language speakers).

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, characterizing 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" (most of the Occitan varieties).

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, increased sensitivity to the rights of minorities have 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.

Classification and related languages[link]

Eastern and Western Romance areas split by the La Spezia-Rimini Line

The classification of the Romance languages is inherently difficult, since most of the linguistic area can be considered a dialect continuum, and in some cases political biases can come into play. Nevertheless, according to SIL counts, 47 Romance languages and dialects are spoken in Europe. Along with Latin (which is not included among the Romance languages) and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, they make up the Italic branch of the Indo-European family.

Note that Dalmatian is now generally grouped under Proto-Italian rather than Eastern Romance.^{[citation needed]}

Proposed divisions[link]

There are various schemes used to subdivide the Romance languages. Three of the most common schemes are as follows:

1. Italo-Western vs. Eastern vs. Southern. This is the scheme followed by Ethnologue, and is based primarily on the outcome of the ten monophthong vowels in Classical Latin. This is discussed more below.
2. West vs. East. This scheme divides the various languages along the La Spezia-Rimini Line, which runs across north-central Italy just to the north of the city of Florence (whose speech forms the basis of standard Italian). In this scheme, "East" includes the languages of central and southern Italy, and the Balkan Romance (or "Eastern Romance") languages in Romania, Greece, and elsewhere in the Balkans; "West" includes the languages of Portugal, Spain, France, northern Italy and Switzerland. Sardinian does not easily fit in this scheme.
3. "Conservative" vs. "innovatory". This is a non-genetic division whose precise boundaries are subject to debate. Generally, the Gallo-Romance languages (discussed further below) form the core "innovatory" languages, with standard French generally considered the most innovatory of all, while the languages near the periphery (which include Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian) are "conservative". Sardinian is generally acknowledged the most conservative Romance language, and was also the first language to split off genetically from the rest, possibly as early as the first century BC. Dante famously denigrated the Sardinians for the conservativeness of their speech, remarking that they imitate Latin "like monkeys imitate men".^[13]

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 Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and French.
• Eastern Romance, which includes the Romance languages of Eastern Europe, such as Romanian.
• Southern Romance, which includes a few languages with particularly archaic features, such as Sardinian and, partially, Corsican. This family is thought to have included the now-vanished Romance languages of Africa (or at least, they appear to have evolved their vowels in the same way).

The three-way division is made primarily based on the outcome of Vulgar Latin (Proto-Romance) vowels:

Italo-Western is in turn split along the so-called La Spezia-Rimini Line in northern Italy, which divides the central and southern Italian languages from the so-called Western Romance languages to the north and west. The primary characteristics dividing the two are:

1. Lenition of intervocalic stops, which happens to the northwest but not to the southeast.
2. Degemination of geminate stops (producing new intervocalic voiceless stops, after the old ones were lenited), which again happens to the northwest but not to the southeast.
3. Deletion of intertonic vowels (between the stressed syllable and either the first or last syllable), again in the northwest but not the southeast.
4. Use of plurals in /s/ in the northwest vs. plurals using vowel change in the southeast.
5. Development of palatalized /k/ before /e,i/ to /(t)s/ in the northwest vs. /tʃ/ in the southeast.
6. Development of /kt/, which develops to /xt/ > /it/ (sometimes progressing further to /tʃ/) in the northwest but /tt/ in the southeast.

In fact, the reality is somewhat more complex. All of the "southeast" characteristics apply to all languages southeast of the line, and all of the "northwest" characteristics apply to all languages in France and (most of) Spain. However, the Gallo‒Italic languages and the Rhaeto-Romance languages of Switzerland and Italy are somewhere in between. All of these languages do have the "northwest" characteristics of lenition and loss of gemination. However:

• The Gallo‒Italic languages have vowel-changing plurals rather than /s/ plurals.
• The Lombard language in north-central Italy and the Rhaeto-Romance languages have the "southeast" characteristic of /tʃ/ instead of /(t)s/ for palatalized /k/.
• The Venetian language in northeast Italy and some of the Rhaeto-Romance languages have the "southeast" characteristic of developing /kt/ to /tt/.

On top of this, the ancient Mozarabic language in southern Spain, at the far end of the "northwest" group, had the "southeast" characteristics of lack of lenition and palatalization of /k/ to /tʃ/. Certain languages around the Pyrenees (e.g. some highland Aragonese dialects) also lack lenition, and northern French dialects such as Norman and Picard have palatalization of /k/ to /tʃ/ (although this is possibly a independent, secondary development, since /k/ between vowels, i.e. when subject to lenition, developed to /dz/ rather than /dʒ/, as would be expected for a primary development).

The usual solution to these issues is to create various nested subgroups. Western Romance is split into the Gallo-Iberian languages, in which lenition happens and which include nearly all the Western Romance languages, and the Pyrenean-Mozarabic group, which includes the remaining languages without lenition (and is unlikely to be a valid clade; probably at least two clades, one for Mozarabic and one for Pyrenean). Gallo-Iberian is split in turn into the Iberian languages (e.g. Spanish and Portuguese), and the larger Gallo-Romance languages (stretching from eastern Spain to northeast Italy).

Probably a more accurate description, however, would be to say that there was a focal point of innovation located in central France, from which a series of innovations spread out as areal changes. The La Spezia-Rimini Line represents the farthest point to the southeast that these innovations reached, corresponding to the northern chain of the Apennine Mountains, which cuts straight across northern Italy and forms a major geographic barrier to further language spread.

This would explain why some of the "northwest" features (almost all of which can be characterized as innovations) end at differing points in northern Italy, and why some of the languages in geographically remote parts of Spain (in the south, and high in the Pyrenees) are lacking some of these features. It also explains why the languages in France (especially standard French) seem to have innovated earlier and more completely than other Western Romance languages.

Many of the "southeast" features also apply to the Eastern Romance languages (particularly, Romanian), despite the geographic discontinuity. Examples are lack of lenition, maintenance of intertonic vowels, use of vowel-changing plurals, and palatalization of /k/ to /tʃ/. (Gemination is missing, which may be an independent development, and /kt/ develops into /pt/ rather than either of the normal Italo-Western developments.) This has led some researchers to postulate a basic two-way East-West division, with the "Eastern" languages including Romanian and central and southern Italian.

Sardinian does not fit into this picture at all. It is clear that Sardinian became linguistically independent from the remainder of the Romance languages at an extremely early date, possibly already by the first century BC. Sardinian contains a large number of archaic features, including total lack of palatalization of /k/ and /g/ and a large amount of vocabulary preserved nowhere else, including some items already archaic by the time of Classical Latin (1st century BC).

Sardinian has plurals in /s/ but no lenition of voiceless consonants (at least in most conservative Nuorese dialects) and a number of innovations unseen elsewhere: most famously, its unique vowel system, but also development of /au/ to /a/, a peculiar sort of lenition that operates as a synchronic feature, and use of su < ipsum as an article (another archaic feature, also seen in the Catalan of the Balearic Islands).

Gallo-Romance languages[link]

The Gallo-Romance languages are generally considered the most innovatory (least conservative) among all the Romance languages. Northern France — the medieval area of the langue d'oïl, out of which modern French developed — was the epicenter. Characteristic Gallo-Romance features generally developed earliest and appear in their most extreme manifestation in the langue d'oïl, gradually spreading out from there along riverways and transalpine roads. It is not coincidental that the earliest vernacular Romance writing occurred in Northern France: Generally, the development of vernacular writing in a given area was forced by the almost total inability of Romance speakers to understand the Classical Latin that still served as the vehicle of writing and culture.

Gallo-Romance languages as a whole are usually characterized by the loss of all unstressed final vowels other than /-a/ (most significantly, final /-o/ and /-e/ were lost). However, when the loss of a final vowel would result in an impossible final cluster (e.g. /tr/), a prop vowel appears in place of the lost vowel, usually /e/. Generally, the same changes also occurred in final syllables closed by a consonant.

Furthermore, loss of /e/ in a final syllable was early enough in Primitive Old French that the Classical Latin third-singular /t/ was often preserved, e.g. venit "he comes" > /ˈvɛːnet/ (Romance vowel changes) > /ˈvjɛnet/ (diphthongization) > /ˈvjɛned/ (lenition) > /ˈvjɛnd/ (Gallo-Romance final vowel loss) > /ˈvjɛnt/ (final devoicing). Elsewhere, final vowel loss occurred later and/or unprotected /t/ was lost earlier (perhaps under Italian influence).

Gallo-Romance is divided four ways:

• The Occitano-Romance languages of southern France and northern Spain, including Occitan and Catalan. The southern members of this group are the most conservative among all Gallo-Romance, with Catalan the most conservative of all. However, the group is known for an innovatory /ɡ/ ending on many subjunctive and preterite verbs, and an unusual development of [ð] (Latin intervocalic -d-), which in many varieties merges with [dz] (from intervocalic palatalized -c- and -ty-). The inclusion of Catalan in this group (and in the Gallo-Romance languages as a whole) is disputed, with some preferring to group it with the Ibero-Romance languages: This reflects the fact that in its early development, Catalan was closely associated with the Occitan dialects but became linguistically independent by the tenth century or so, with further influence coming from Spain.
• The Langues d'oïl, most notably French but also including Franco-Provençal.
• The Gallo-Italian languages of northern Italy, including Piedmontese, Ligurian, Western Lombard, Eastern Lombard, and Emiliano-Romagnolo.
• The Rhaeto-Romance languages, including various languages of the southeast Swiss mountains as well as the northeast Italian languages of Ladin and Friulian. This is a diverse group, with the Swiss languages taking after the langues d'oïl and the Italian languages taking after the nearby Italo-Romance languages.

Other than southern Occitano-Romance, the Gallo-Romance languages are quite innovatory, with French and some of the Gallo-Italian languages rivaling each other for the most extreme phonological changes compared with conservative languages. For example, French sain, saint, sein, ceint, ceint meaning "healthy, holy, breast, (he) girds, (was) girded" (Latin sānum, sanctum, sinum, cinget, cinctum) are all pronounced /sɛ̃/; similarly cent, sent, sans, sang meaning "hundred, (he) feels, without, blood" (Latin centum, sentit, (ab)sentis, sanguen) are all pronounced /sɑ̃/.

In some ways, however, the Gallo-Romance languages are conservative. The older stages of many of the languages are famous for preserving a two-case system consisting of nominative and oblique, fully marked on nouns, adjectives and determiners, inherited almost directly from the Latin nominative and accusative cases and preserving a number of different declensional classes and irregular forms.

In the opposite of the normal pattern, the languages closest to the oïl epicenter preserve the case system the best, while languages at the periphery — near to languages that had long before lost the case system except on pronouns — lose it early. For example, the case system is well-preserved in Old Occitan up through the thirteenth century or so but is totally lost in Old Catalan at the time, despite being virtually the same language at the time.

Notable characteristics of the Gallo-Romance languages are:

• Early loss of all final vowels other than /a/ — the defining characteristic, as noted above.
• Further reductions of final vowels in Langue d'oïl and many Gallo-Italic languages, with the feminine /a/ and prop vowel /e/ merging into /ə/, which is often subsequently dropped.
• Early, heavy reduction of unstressed vowels in the interior of a word (another defining characteristic). This, along with final vowel reduction, accounts for the lion's share of the extreme phonemic differences between the Northern and Central Italian dialects, which otherwise share a great deal of vocabulary and syntax.
• Loss of final vowels phonemicized the long vowels that formerly were automatic concomitants of stressed open syllables. These phonemic long vowels are maintained directly in many Northern Italian dialects. Elsewhere, phonemic length was lost, but in the meantime many of the long vowels diphthongized, resulting in a maintenance of the original distinction. The langue d'oïl branch is again at the forefront of innovation, with no less than five of the seven long vowels diphthongizing (only high vowels were spared).
• Front rounded vowels are present in all four branches. /u/ usually fronts to /y/, and secondary mid front rounded vowels often develop from long /oː/ and/or /ɔː/.
• Extreme lenition (i.e. multiple rounds of lenition) occurs in many languages esp. in Langue d'oïl and many Gallo-Italian languages. Examples from French: ˈvītam > vie /vi/ "life"; *saˈpūtum > su /sy/ "known"; similarly vu /vy/ "seen" < *vidūtum, pu /py/ "been able" < *potūtum, eu /y/ "had" < *habūtum.
• The Langue d'oïl, Swiss Rhaeto-Romance languages and many of the northern dialects of Occitan have a secondary palatalization of /k/ and /ɡ/ before /a/, producing different results from the primary Romance palatalization: e.g. centum "hundred" > cent /sɑ̃/, cantum "song" > chant /ʃɑ̃/.
• Other than the Occitano-Romance languages, most Gallo-Romance languages are subject-obligatory (whereas all the rest of the Romance languages are pro-drop languages). This is a late development triggered by progressive phonetic erosion: Old French was still a null-subject language, and this only changed upon loss of secondarily final consonants in Middle French.

The Gallo-Italian and Italian Rhaeto-Romance languages have a number of features in common with the other Italian languages:

• Loss of final /s/, which triggers raising of the preceding vowel (more properly, the /s/ "debuccalizes" to /j/, which is monophthongized into a higher vowel), e.g. /-as/ -> /-e/, /-es/ -> /-i/, hence Standard Italian plural cani < canes, subjunctive tu canti < tu cantes, indicative tu cante < tu cantas (now tu canti in Standard Italian, borrowed from the subjunctive); amiche "female friends" < amicas.^[14]
• Use of nominative -i for masculine plurals instead of accusative -os.

Pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages[link]

Some Romance languages have developed varieties which seem dramatically restructured as to their grammars or to be mixtures with other languages. It is not always clear whether they should be classified as Romance, pidgins, creole languages, or mixed languages. Some other languages, such as English, are sometimes thought of as creoles of semi-Romance ancestry. There are several dozens of creoles of Portuguese, Swahili, Spanish and French origin, some of them spoken as national languages in former European colonies.

Creoles of French:

• Haitian Creole (Haiti official language)
• Kweyol (French Antilles)
• Seselwa (Seychelles official language)

Creoles of Spanish:

• Chavacano (in part of Philippines)
• Palenquero (in part of Colombia)

Creoles of Portuguese:

• Kabuverdianu (Cape Verde regional language)
• Forro (São Tomé and Príncipe regional language)
• Papiamento (Dutch Antilles official language)

Auxiliary and constructed languages[link]

Latin and the Romance languages have also served as the inspiration and basis of numerous auxiliary and constructed languages, such as Interlingua, its reformed version Modern Latin,^[15] Latino sine flexione, Occidental, and Lingua Franca Nova, as well as 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^[16] (mirrors Irish), Wenedyk (mirrors Polish), Þrjótrunn (mirrors Icelandic),^[17] and Helvetian (mirrors German).^[18]

Linguistic features[link]

Basic features[link]

Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages:

• Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to words to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns. The amount of synthesis is significantly more than English, but less than Classical Latin and much less than the oldest Indo-European languages (e.g. Ancient Greek, Sanskrit). Inflection is fusional, with a single morpheme representing multiple features (as contrasted with agglutinative languages such as Turkish or Japanese). For example, Portuguese amei "I loved" is composed of am- "love" and the fusional morpheme -ei "first person, singular, preterite tense, indicative".
• Romance languages have a fairly strict subject–verb–object word order, with predominant use of head-first (right-branching) constructions. Adjectives, genitives and relative clauses all follow their head noun, although (except in Romanian) determiners usually precede.
• In general, nouns, adjectives and determiners inflect only according to grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) and grammatical number (singular or plural). Grammatical case is marked only on pronouns, as in English; case marking, as in English, is of the nominative–accusative type (rather than e.g. the ergative–absolutive marking of Basque or the split ergativity of Hindi). A significant exception, however, is Romanian, with two-case marking (nominative/accusative vs. genitive/dative) on nominal elements.
• Verbs are inflected according to a complex morphology that marks person, number (singular or plural), tense, mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), and sometimes aspect and/or gender. Grammatical voice (active, passive, middle/reflexive) and some grammatical aspects (in particular, the perfect aspect) are expressed using periphrastic constructions.
• Most Romance languages are null subject languages (but modern French is not, as a result of the phonetic decay of verb endings).
• All Romance languages have two articles (definite and indefinite), and many have in addition a partitive article (expressing the concept of "some"). In some languages (notably, French), the use of an article with a noun is nearly obligatory; it serves to express grammatical number (no longer marked on most nouns) and to cope with the extreme homophony of French vocabulary as a result of extensive sound reductions.
• The phonology of most Romance languages is of moderate size with few unusual phonemes. Phonemic vowel length is uncommon. Some languages have developed nasal vowels and/or front rounded vowels.
• Word accent is of the stress (dynamic) type, rather than making use of pitch (as in Ancient Greek and some modern Slavic languages), and is free, occurring more or less unpredictably on one of the last three syllables. In practice, the stress is largely predictable, due to the many morphological and phonological stress-related patterns.

Changes from Classical Latin[link]

Case system

The most significant changes between Classical Latin and Proto-Romance (and hence all the modern Romance languages) relate to the reduction and loss of the Latin case system, and the corresponding syntactic changes that were triggered.

The case system was drastically reduced from the vigorous six-case system of Latin. Although four cases can be constructed for Proto-Romance nouns (nominative, accusative, combined genitive/dative, and vocative), the vocative is marginal and present only in Romanian (where it may be an outright innovation), and of the remaining cases, no more than two are present in any one language. Romanian is the only modern Romance language with case marking on nouns, with a two-way opposition between nominative/accusative and genitive/dative. Some of the older Gallo-Romance languages (in particular, Old French, Old Occitan and Old Sursilvan) had an opposition between nominative and general oblique.

The system of multiple noun declensions was also dramatically reduced; most modern languages have only three types (masculine -o, feminine -a, and an -e that can be either gender). As in English, case is preserved better on pronouns than elsewhere, with some pronouns marked for as many as four cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive) plus additional possessive and disjunctive forms.

Concomitant with the loss of cases, freedom of word order was greatly reduced. Classical Latin had a generally verb-final (SOV) but overall quite free word order, with a significant amount of word scrambling and mixing of left-branching and right-branching constructions. The Romance languages eliminated word scrambling and nearly all left-branching constructions, with most languages developing a rigid SVO, right-branching syntax. (Old French, however, had a freer word order due to the two-case system still present, as well as a predominantly verb-second word order developed under the influence of the Germanic languages.)

Some freedom, however, is allowed in the placement of adjectives relative to their head noun. In addition, some languages (e.g. Spanish, Romanian) have an "accusative preposition" (Romanian per, Spanish "personal a") along with clitic doubling, which allows for some freedom in ordering the arguments of a verb.

The Romance languages developed grammatical articles where Latin had none. Articles are often introduced around the time a robust case system falls apart in order to disambiguate the remaining case markers (which are usually too ambiguous by themselves) and to serve as parsing clues that signal the presence of a noun (a function formerly served by the case endings themselves).

This was the pattern followed by the Romance languages: In the Romance languages that still preserved a functioning nominal case system (e.g. Romanian and Old French), only the combination of article and case ending serves to uniquely identify number and case (compare the similar situation in modern German). All Romance languages have a definite article (originally developed from ipse "self" but replaced in nearly all languages by ille "that (over there)") and an indefinite article (developed from ūnus "one"). Many also have a partitive article (dē "of" + definite article).

Latin had a large number of syntactic constructions expressed through infinitives, participles, and similar nominal constructs. Examples are the ablative absolute, the accusative-plus-infinitive construction used for reported speech, gerundive constructions, and the common use of reduced relative clauses expressed through participles. All of these are replaced in the Romance languages by subordinate clauses expressed with finite verbs, making the Romance languages much more "verbal" and less "nominal" than Latin. Under the influence of the Balkan sprachbund, Romanian has progressed the furthest, largely eliminating the infinitive. (It is currently being revived, however, due to the increasing influence of other Romance languages.)

Other changes

• Loss of phonemic vowel length, and change into a free-stressed language. Classical Latin had an automatically determined stress on the second or third syllable from the end, conditioned by vowel length; once vowel length was neutralized, stress was no longer predictable so long as it remained where it was (which it mostly did).
• Development of a series of palatal consonants as a result of palatalization.
• Loss of most traces of the neuter gender.
• Development of a series of analytic perfect tenses, comparable to English "I have done, I had done, I will have done".
• Loss of the Latin synthetic passive voice, replaced by an analytic construction comparable to English "it is/was done".
• Loss of deponent verbs, replaced by active-voice verbs.
• Replacement of the Latin future tense with a new tense formed (usually) by a periphrasis of infinitive + present tense of habēre "have", which usually contracts into a new synthetic tense. A corresponding conditional tense is formed in the same way but using one of the past-tense forms of habēre.
• Numerous lexical changes. A number of words were borrowed from the Germanic languages and Celtic languages. Many basic nouns and verbs, especially those that were short and/or had irregular morphology, were replaced by longer derived forms with regular morphology. Throughout the medieval period, words were borrowed from Classical Latin in their original form (learned words) or in something approaching the original form (semi-learned words), often replacing the popular forms of the same words.