Romance Branch of the Indo-European Family
Introduction
|
All Romance languages are descendants of Vulgar Latin dialects spoken by the common people in the Roman Empire, a vast territory that covered a good portion of Europe, England, Northern Africa and portions of the Middle East. After the breakup of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, these dialects diverged from each other and evolved into dozens of distinct languages by the 9th century AD.
Although there is little documentary evidence about Vulgar Latin, it is believed that it had most of the features shared by Romance languages and that distinguish them from Classical Latin. Among them are the loss of declensions and of neuter gender and of many verbal tenses. In the 14th century, the term Romance meant "vernacular language of France" (as opposed to Latin), from Old French romanz "verse narrative," originally an adverb, "in the vernacular language," from Vulgar Latin *romanice scribere "to write in a Romance language." The term was extended in the 17th century to include other languages derived from Latin. The phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax of all Romance languages are predominantly derived from Vulgar Latin. As a result, they all share many linguistic features. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The largest Romance language is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian and Catalan. The first five languages are official national languages in more than one country. A few other languages have official regional status e.g., Sardinian in Italy, Rhaeto-Romansch in Switzerland, Galician and Catalan in Spain. In addition, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian are official and working languages of the European Union. The table below lists major Romance languages/dialects, number of speakers and their status, based on data from Ethnologue.
The far-flung empires of Spain, Portugal and France spread Romance languages to the other continents to such an extent that well over half of all Romance speakers are now outside Europe, as shown on this map from Wikipedia.
|
Mexico 
Romania
Romanian 
Dialects |
Dialects Romance languages have many local dialects which form a continuum of varieties that cross country borders and stretch from Portuguese in the west to Romanian in the east. It is often difficult to differentiate between a language and a dialect. Some varieties are particularly difficult to classify. For instance it is difficult to decide whether Galician is a separate language or a Spanish-influenced variety of Portuguese. |
Structure
Sound System |
The sound systems of Romance languages have some basic features in common such as.
|
|
Grammar
|
|
Vocabulary Below are some common expressions in seven Romance languages. The similarities and the differences can be easily seen. Keep in mind that writing does not represent the actual pronunciation of these words.
The numbers 1-10 in different Romance languages also show patterns of similarities and differences.
|
Writing
|
The evolution of Vulgar Latin into different languages in various parts of the Roman Empire is poorly documented in the 5th-10 centuries because the written language was Classical Latin. However, in the 10th-13 centuries, people in different parts of the Roman Empire started to write in their own languages instead of Latin. The transition to writing in the vernacular was greatly facilitated by local poets and writers. All Romance languages are written with modified versions of the standard 26-letter Latin alphabet:
In all Romance languages, the letters K and W are used exclusively in borrowed words and foreign names. |
Resources
 |
How difficult is it to learn Romance Languages?
|
Copyright 2007 © National Virtual Translation Center