The Romance languages spread throughout the world owing to the period of European colonialism beginning in the 15th century. There are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and parts of Africa. French, Spanish, and Portuguese also have many non-native speakers; they are widely used as lingua francas. There are also numerous regional Romance languages and dialects. This makes drawing language boundaries difficult, and thus there is no unambiguous way to divide the Romance varieties into individual languages. The following is a list of groupings of Romance languages, with some languages chosen to exemplify each grouping.
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.
With almost 500 million speakers worldwide, Spanish is an official language in Spain and in nine countries of South America, home to about half that continent's population; in six countries of Central America (all except Belize); and in Mexico. In the Caribbean, it is official in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. In all these countries, Latin American Spanish is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish the most native speakers of any Romance language.
In Africa, Spanish is one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea. Spanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973.
Portuguese, in its homeland, Portugal, is spoken by almost the entire population of 10 million. As the official language of Brazil, it is spoken by more than 200 million people, making Portuguese the most spoken official Romance language in a single country. Portuguese is the official language of six African countries (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea, and São Tomé and Príncipe), and is spoken as a native language by perhaps 16 million residents of that continent.
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In Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages in East Timor and Macau, while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia-some 400,000-are in Japan due to return immigration of Japanese Brazilians. In Oceania, Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in East Timor.
Outside Europe, French is spoken natively most in the Canadian province of Quebec, and in parts of New Brunswick and Ontario. Canada is officially bilingual, with French and English being the official languages and government services in French theoretically mandated to be provided nationwide. In parts of the Caribbean, such as Haiti, French has official status, but most people speak creoles such as Haitian Creole as their native language.
Although Italy also had some colonial possessions before World War II, its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial period. As a result, Italian outside Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia.
Romania did not establish a colonial empire. The native range of Romanian includes Moldova, where it is the dominant language and spoken by a majority of the population, and neighboring areas in Serbia (Vojvodina and the Bor District), Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ukraine (Bukovina, Budjak) and in some villages between the Dniester and Bug rivers. As with Italian, Romanian is spoken outside its ethnic range by immigrant communities. In Europe, Romanian speakers form about two percent of the population in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Romanian is also spoken in Israel by Romanian Jews, where it is the native language of five percent of the population, and is spoken by many more as a secondary language. The total of 880 million native speakers of Romance languages (ca.
Catalan is the official language of Andorra. In Spain, it is co-official with Spanish in Catalonia, the Valencian Community (under the name Valencian), and the Balearic Islands, and it is recognized, but not official, in an area of Aragon known as La Franja. In addition, it is spoken by many residents of Alghero, on the island of Sardinia and is co-official in that city.
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Galician, with more than three million speakers, is official together with Spanish in Galicia, and has legal recognition in neighbouring territories in Castilla y León. The remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact.
National governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well as a potential source of separatist movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it, by extensively promoting the use of the official language, restricting the use of the other languages in the media, recognizing them as mere "dialects", or even persecuting them. As a result, all of these languages are considered endangered to varying degrees according to the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages, ranging from "vulnerable" (e.g. Sicilian and Venetian) to "severely endangered" (Franco-Provençal, most of the Occitan varieties). Since the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, increased sensitivity to the rights of minorities has allowed some of these languages to start recovering their prestige and lost rights.
Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Roman Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language in continental Western Europe. During the empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and the collapse of its Western half in the fifth and sixth centuries, spoken varieties of Latin became more isolated from each other, with the western dialects coming under heavy Germanic influence (the Goths and Franks in particular) and the eastern dialects coming under Slavic influence. The dialects diverged from Latin at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies.
Despite other influences (e.g. substratum from pre-Roman languages, especially Continental Celtic languages; and superstratum from later Germanic or Slavic invasions), the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin. However, some notable differences exist between today's Romance languages and their Roman ancestor. With only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have dropped the Latin inflection system, instead making extensive use of prepositions. Documentary evidence about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research is limited, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize.
Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers, and more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. In Western Europe, Latin gradually replaced Celtic and other Italic languages, which were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin. To some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire (from the end of the first century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language.
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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. British and African Romance-the forms of Vulgar Latin used in Britain and the Roman province of Africa, where it had been spoken by much of the urban population-disappeared in the Middle Ages (as did Moselle Romance in Germany). But the Germanic tribes that had penetrated Roman Italy, Gaul, and Hispania eventually adopted Latin/Romance and the remnants of the culture of ancient Rome alongside existing inhabitants of those regions, and so Latin remained the dominant language there.
Meanwhile, large-scale migrations into the Eastern Roman Empire started with the Goths and continued with Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Slavs, Pechenegs, Hungarians and Cumans. Over the course of the fourth to eighth centuries, local changes in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon accumulated to the point that the speech of any locale was noticeably different from that of another.
Map of Romania Showing Its Location in Europe
In all of the above examples, the words appearing in the fourth century Vulgate are the same words as would have been used in Classical Latin of c. 50 BC. It is likely that some of these words had already disappeared from casual speech by the time of the Glosses; but if so, they may well have been still widely understood, as there is no recorded evidence that the common people of the time had difficulty understanding the language. By the 8th century, the situation was very different.
During the late 8th century, Charlemagne, holding that "Latin of his age was by classical standards intolerably corrupt", successfully imposed Classical Latin as an artificial written vernacular for Western Europe. By this time, and possibly as early as the 6th century according to Price (1984), the Romance lects had split apart enough to be able to speak of separate Gallo-Romance, Ibero-Romance, Italo-Romance and Eastern Romance languages. Some researchers have postulated that the major divergences in the spoken dialects began or accelerated considerably in the 5th century, as the formerly widespread and efficient communication networks of the Western Roman Empire rapidly broke down, leading to the total disappearance of the Western Roman Empire by the end of the century.
During the period between the 5th-10th centuries AD Romance vernaculars documentation is scarce as the normal writing language used was Medieval Latin, with vernacular writing only beginning in earnest in the 11th or 12th century. From the 10th century onwards, some local vernaculars developed a written form and began to supplant Latin in many of its roles. In some countries, such as Portugal, this transition was expedited by force of law; whereas in others, such as Italy, many prominent poets and writers used the vernacular of their own accord - some of the most famous in Italy being Giacomo da Lentini and Dante Alighieri. The invention of the printing press brought a tendency towards greater uniformity of standard languages within political boundaries, at the expense of other Romance languages and dialects less favored politically.
The Romance Languages and What Makes Them Amazing
Some of the divergence comes from semantic change: where the same root words have developed different meanings. For example, the Portuguese word fresta is descended from Latin fenestra "window" (and is thus cognate to French fenêtre, Italian finestra, Romanian fereastră and so on), but now means "skylight" and "slit". Cognates may exist but have become rare, such as hiniestra in Spanish, or dropped out of use entirely. 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 jantar (related to archaic Spanish yantar "to eat") because of semantic changes in the 19th century. Spanish, Asturian, and Leonese ventana and Mirandese and Sardinian bentana come from Latin ventus "wind" (cf.
Along with Latin and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, the Romance languages make up the Italic branch of the Indo-European family. Identifying subdivisions of the Romance languages is inherently problematic, because most of the linguistic area is a dialect continuum, and in some cases political biases can come into play. A tree model is often used, but the selection of criteria results in different trees. Most classification schemes are, implicitly or not, historical and geographic, resulting in groupings such as Ibero- and Gallo-Romance.
Southern Romance, which includes Sardinian and Corsican (even if Corsican is considered by some linguists to be a form of Tuscan, so Italo-Western). Another approach involves attempts to rank the distance of Romance languages from each other or from their common ancestor (i.e. ranking languages based on how conservative or innovative they are, although the same language may be conservative in some respects while innovative in others). By most measures, French is the most highly differentiated Romance language, although Romanian has changed the greatest amount of its vocabulary, while Italian and Sardinian have changed the least.
Some Romance languages have developed varieties which seem dramatically restructured as to their grammars or to be mixtures with other languages. The concept was first developed in 1903 by Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano, under the title Latino sine flexione. He wanted to create a naturalistic international language, as opposed to an autonomous constructed language like Esperanto or Volapük which were designed for maximal simplicity of lexicon and derivation of words. Other languages developed include Idiom Neutral (1902), Interlingue-Occidental (1922), Interlingua (1951) and Lingua Franca Nova (1998). The most famous and successful of these is Interlingua.
Each of these languages has attempted to varying degrees to achieve a pseudo-Latin vocabulary as common as possible to living Romance languages. There are also languages created for artistic purposes only, such as Talossan.
Because Latin is a very well attested ancient language, some amateur linguists have even constructed Romance languages that mirror real languages that developed from other ancestral languages. Many final consonants were rare, occurring only in certain prepositions (e.g. ad "towards", apud "at, near (a person)"), conjunctions (sed "but"), demonstratives (e.g. illud "that (over there)", hoc "this"), and nominative singular noun forms, especially of neuter nouns (e.g. lac "milk", mel "honey", cor "heart").
Many of these prepositions and conjunctions were replaced by others, while the nouns were regularized into forms based on their oblique stems that avoided the final consonants (e.g. Final -m was dropped in Vulgar Latin. Even in Classical Latin, final -am, -em, -um were often elided in poetic meter, suggesting the m was weakly pronounced, probably marking the ...
What happened to African Romance following the Arab conquest in 696 is difficult to trace, though it was soon replaced by Arabic as the primary administrative language. The Normans, when they were acquiring their African kingdom in the 12th century, received help from the remaining Christian populations of Tunisia, and some historians such as Vermondo Brugnatelli argue that those Christians still spoke a Romance language. The language may have existed until the arrival of the Banu Hilal Arabs and probably until the beginning of the fourteenth century, according to scholar Andrew H.
