 Romance languages in the World Blue-French; Green-Spanish; Orange-Portuguese; Yellow-Italian; Red-Romanian 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. Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1357x628, 42 KB) Summary Romance languages in the World Blue - French Green - Spanish Orange - Portuguese Yellow - Italian Red - Romanian Compilation of Image:Map_Italophone_World. ...
Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1357x628, 42 KB) Summary Romance languages in the World Blue - French Green - Spanish Orange - Portuguese Yellow - Italian Red - Romanian Compilation of Image:Map_Italophone_World. ...
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred languages and dialects (443 according to the SIL estimate), including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many in Southwest Asia, Central Asia and Southern Asia. ...
Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...
For other senses of this name, see Roman Empire (disambiguation). ...
World map showing the Americas The Americas commonly refers to the landmass of the Western Hemisphere, consisting of the continents of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions. ...
Europe is conventionally considered one of the seven continents of Earth which, in this case, is more a cultural and political distinction than a physiographic one, leading to some dispute as to Europes actual borders. ...
A satellite composite image of Africa Africa is the worlds second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia. ...
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. Vulgar Latin, as in this political engraving at Pompeii, was the language of the ordinary people of the Roman Empire, distinct from the Classical Latin of literature. ...
For other senses of this name, see Roman Empire (disambiguation). ...
Classical Latin is the language used by the principal exponents of that language in what is usually regarded as classical Latin literature. ...
The Iberian Peninsula, or Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe. ...
Map of the Black Sea. ...
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. Phonology (Greek phonē = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). ...
Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ...
A lexicon is usually a list of words together with additional word-specific information, i. ...
Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning co- or together) and τάξις (táxis, meaning sequence, order, arrangement), can in linguistics be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ...
In linguistics, declension is a paradigm of inflected nouns. ...
In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO) is the sequence subject verb object in neutral expressions: Sam ate oranges. ...
An adposition is a term in grammar used for a wide variety of particles and affixes which are attached to a noun phrase to modify it or to show its relation to another concept or situation in the same clause. ...
History
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 /k/ and /g/. The word neuter can refer to: the property of being neither biologically male or female: being asexual the sterilization (castration, spaying, etc. ...
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. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
The Slavic peoples are defined by their linguistic attainment of the Slavic languages. ...
The Huns were a confederation of Eurasian tribes, most likely of diverse origin with a Turkic-speaking aristocracy, who appeared in Europe in the 4th century, the most famous being Attila the Hun. ...
Royal motto (French): Dieu et mon droit (Translated: God and my right) Englands location (dark green) within the British Isles Languages None official English de facto Capital None official London de facto Largest city London Area – Total Ranked 1st UK 130,395 km² Population – Total (mid-2004) – Total (2001...
The Iberian Peninsula, or Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe. ...
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.
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.
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. OC redirects here. ...
Franco-Provençal (Francoprovençal) or Arpitan (in vernacular: patouès) (in Italian: francoprovenzale, arpitano, patois; French: francoprovençal, arpitan, patois) is a Romance language with several dialects in a linguistic sub-group separate from Langue dOïl and Langue dOc. ...
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)[1]. From this adverb originated the noun romance, which applied initially to anything written in a romanice loqui. // Greek origin of the term Barbarian comes the French barbarien or Medieval Latin barbarinus, from Latin barbaria, from Latin barbarus, from the ancient Greek word βάÏβαÏος (barbaros) which meant a non-Greek, someone whose (first) language was not Greek. ...
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. Catalan (Català IPA: ) a Romance language, the national and official language of Catalunya (Catalonia) (On April 3rd 06 the central government of Spain finally recognised the right to define Catalonia as a NATION on the text of the Catalan Constitution) and the Principality of Andorra. ...
A national language is a language (or language variant, i. ...
This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ...
Franco-Provençal (Francoprovençal) or Arpitan (in vernacular: patouès) (in Italian: francoprovenzale, arpitano, patois; French: francoprovençal, arpitan, patois) is a Romance language with several dialects in a linguistic sub-group separate from Langue dOïl and Langue dOc. ...
Romansh (also spelled Rumantsch, Romansch or Romanche) is one of the four national languages of Switzerland, along with German, Italian and French. ...
Galician (Galician: galego) is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia. ...
Aranese (Aranés or Aranais) is a dialect of Gascon (which is part of the Occitan language group of the Romance languages), spoken in Val dAran, in Spain, where it is an official language. ...
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. Separatism involves setting oneself or others apart. ...
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.
Linguistic features
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: The Celtic languages are the languages descended from Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, spoken by ancient and modern Celts alike. ...
The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia. ...
The Indo-Iranian language group constitute the easternmost branch of the Indo-European family of languages. ...
The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...
The Arabic language (Arabic: ‎ translit: ), or simply Arabic (Arabic: ‎ translit: ), is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ...
Basque (in Basque: Euskara) is the language spoken by the Basque people who inhabit the Pyrenees in North-Central Spain and the adjoining region of South-Western France. ...
Tamil (தமிழ௠) is a classical language and one of the major languages of the Dravidian language family. ...
- 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).
A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) which can co-occur with (in)definite articles and attributive adjectives, and function as the head of a noun phrase. ...
A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ...
An adjective is a part of speech which modifies a noun, usually describing it or making its meaning more specific. ...
An adverb is a part of speech-class. ...
Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i. ...
Suffix has meanings in linguistics, nomenclature and computer science. ...
In grammar, a clause is a group of words consisting of a subject and a predicate, although, in non-finite clauses, the subject is often not explicitly given. ...
A syntactic verb argument, in linguistics, is a phrase that appears in a relationship with the verb in a proposition. ...
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Narrator. ...
In linguistics, the term grammatical number refers to ways of expressing quantity by inflecting words. ...
The subject of a sentence is one of the two main parts of a sentence, the other being the predicate. ...
In linguistics, noun classes, also called grammatical gender is a type of inflection. ...
It has been suggested that Tonal language be merged into this article or section. ...
Yorùbá is a language of sub-Saharan Africa. ...
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.
Dual is the grammatical number used for two referents. ...
The word singular may refer to one of several concepts. ...
Look up Plural in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. ...
The word copula originates from the Latin noun for a link or tie that connects two different things. ...
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ...
Variants of the Latin alphabet are used by the writing systems of many languages throughout the world. ...
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 [k] and [g] — have other sounds when they come before E and I. (See below.)
In linguistics, declension is a paradigm of inflected nouns. ...
The genitive case is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun. ...
The dative case is a grammatical case for nouns and/or pronouns. ...
Old French is a term sometimes used to refer to the langue doïl, the continuum of varieties of Romance language spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of Belgium and Switzerland during the period roughly from 1000 to 1300 A.D...
In linguistics (or generally in the linguistic sciences), an oblique case (Lat. ...
In linguistics, noun classes, also called grammatical gender is a type of inflection. ...
The word neuter can refer to: the property of being neither biologically male or female: being asexual the sterilization (castration, spaying, etc. ...
Classical Latin is the language used by the principal exponents of that language in what is usually regarded as classical Latin literature. ...
In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO) is the sequence subject verb object in neutral expressions: Sam ate oranges. ...
In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. ...
In Latin grammar, the ablative absolute (Ablativus absolutus) is a noun phrase cast in the ablative case. ...
An article is a word that is put next to a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. ...
Demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to, and distinguishes those entities from others. ...
It has been suggested that Future perfect tense be merged into this article or section. ...
The conditional tense (sometimes described as the conditional mood) is a verb form in many languages, in which a verb root is modified to form verb tenses, moods, or aspects expressing degrees of certainty or uncertainty and hypothesis about past, present, or future. ...
In grammar, the infinitive is the form of a verb that has no inflection to indicate person, number, mood or tense. ...
Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i. ...
In linguistics, a participle is a verbal adjective. ...
In linguistics, a clitic is a word that syntactically functions as a free morpheme, but phonetically appears as a bound morpheme; it is always pronounced with a following or preceding word. ...
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. ...
In linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence. ...
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.
In sociolinguistics, a T-V distinction describes the situation wherein a language, unlike current English, has pronouns that distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee. ...
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. This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ...
Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ...
Languedocien is a Romance language akin to Provençal spoken by some people in the part of southern France known as Languedoc. ...
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. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
The Serbian language is one of the standard versions of the Å tokavian dialect (former standard was known as Serbo-Croatian language). ...
Balkan linguistic union or Balkansprachbund is a name given to the similarities in grammar, syntax, vocabulary and phonology found in the languages of the Balkans, which belong to various Indo-European branches, such as Albanian, Greek, Romance and Slavic. ...
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 [lu] and lune [lyn]. 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. The Romanians (români in present-day Romanian and rumâni in historical contexts) are an ethnic group; they are the majority inhabitants of Romania and of Moldova (where they are also called Moldovans, a disputed term); each of these countries also have other significant ethnic minorities, and the Romanians...
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.. Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken by over two million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy. ...
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"). In poetry and phonetics, epenthesis (Greek epi, on × en, in + thesis, putting) is the insertion of a phoneme or syllable into a word, usually to facilitate pronunciation. ...
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 ['papa] ("Pope") and papà [pa'pa] ("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. Speech segmentation is the process of identifying the boundaries between words, syllables, or phonemes in spoken natural languages. ...
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 [meːˌ'tjaˌmoˌtʃeˌne] ("let's put some of it in there") or Spanish entregándomelo [enˌtreˌ'ganˌdoˌmeˌlo] ("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.
Formation of plurals Some Romance languages form plurals by adding /s/ (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 /i/). See La Spezia-Rimini Line for more information. In the linguistics of the Romance languages, the La Spezia-Rimini Line is a line that refers to a number of important isoglosses that distinguish the eastern Romance languages from the western Romance languages. ...
- Plural in /s/: Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian.
- Vowel change: Italian, Romanian.
- No marking: French (formerly marked with /s/, but this has been lost in the spoken language; plural marking is now indicated on the associated determiner rather than the noun itself)
Determiners are words which quantify or identify nouns. ...
Borrowed words
Derivations
Words for "more" Some Romance languages use a version of Latin plus, others a version of magis. - Plus-derived: French plus /ply/, Italian più /pju/, dialectal Catalan pus /pus/ (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")
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".
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. Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...
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: In linguistics, an auxiliary or helping verb is a verb whose function it is to give further semantic information about the main or full verb which follows it. ...
- 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").
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. In linguistics, an auxiliary or helping verb is a verb whose function it is to give further semantic information about the main or full verb which follows it. ...
- "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"). An unaccusative verb is a special kind of intransitive verb, which is distinguished semantically by the fact that its subject does not actively initiate or is not actively responsible for the action of the verb; rather, it has properties which it shares with the direct object of a transitive verb...
An unergative verb is a special kind of intransitive verb, which is distinguished semantically by the fact that the subject is perceived as actively initiating or actively responsible for the action expressed by the verb. ...
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).
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. This article is about the grammatical term. ...
Look up Perfect in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
Writing systems
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. Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...
A trigraph (from the Greek words tria = three and grapho = write) is a group of three letters used to represent a single sound. ...
A characteristic feature of the the writing systems of all Romance languages is that the Latin letters C and G — which usually sound like [k] and [g] — have other sounds when they come before E and I. This is due to a general palatalization or affrication of the [k] and [g] sounds before front vowels, like [i] and [e], 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. Palatalization means pronouncing a sound nearer to the hard palate, making it more like a palatal consonant; this is towards the front of the mouth for a velar or uvular consonant, but towards the back of the mouth for a front (e. ...
Africation is a sound change by which a stop consonant is changed to an affricate. ...
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 [k], but "softened" before E or I in all languages — to [s] in French, Portuguese and Catalan, [tʃ] in Italian and Romanian, [θ] or [s] in Spanish.
- G: generally [g] or [ɣ], but "softened" before E or I in all languages — to [ʒ] in French, Portuguese and Catalan, to [dʒ] in Italian and Romanian, to [x] in Spanish.
- H: silent in French, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese; pronounced as [h] in Romanian. Used in various digraphs (see below).
- J: pronounced [ʒ] in most languages; [x] in Spanish; [j] in Sicilian and Italian, but normally replaced with I in native Italian words.
- Q: always used before U. (See below.)
- S: usually [z] between vowels in Italian, French, Portuguese and Catalan. In Spanish, [s] between vowels.
- W: used only in Walloon language. Pronounced [v] in French, with the exception of words borrowed from English.
- X: normally [ʃ] in Old Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, but also [z], [ks], [gz] and [s], in loan words from Latin or Greek, and in French. Either [ks] or [gs] or [s] in Spanish. Not used in Italian. Either [ks] or [gz] in Romanian.
- Y: used in French and Spanish as a vowel [i], and in Spanish also as a consonant [j], [ʒ] or [dʒ].
- Z: either [dz] or [ts] in Italian; [θ] or [s] in Spanish; [z] 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. Walloon (Walon) is a regional Romance language spoken as a second language by some in Belgium. ...
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. ...
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 [k] sound before E or I; for [tʃ] in Spanish; for [ʃ] in most other languages.
- ÇH: used in Poitevin-Saintongeais for voiceless palatal fricative [ç]
- DD: used in Sicilian for [ɖ].
- DJ: used in Walloon for [dʒ].
- GI: used in Italian and Romanian to get the [dʒ] sound before A, O, or U.
- GH: used in Italian and Romanian to get the [g] sound before E or I; not used in other languages.
- GL: used in Italian for [ʎ].
- GN: used in French and Italian for [ɲ], as in champignon or gnocchi.
- GU: used before E or I for the sound [g] or [ɣ], in all Romance except Italian, Romanian and some standards of Norman.
- JH: used in Poitevin-Saintongeais for aspirated [ʒ].
- LH: used in Portuguese and Aranese for [ʎ].
- LL: used in Spanish, Catalan, Norman and Dgèrnésiais, originally for [ʎ] but often pronounced [j], [ʒ]. Pronounced either [l] or [j], in French.
- L·L: used in Catalan for a long [l].
- NH: used in Portuguese and Aranese for [ɲ].
- NY: used in Catalan for [ɲ].
- QU: used before E or I for [k], in all Romance except Italian, Romanian and some varieties of Norman.
- RR: used between vowels in several languages to denote a guttural R (trilled [r] in Spanish and Italian) instead of simple [ɾ].
- SC: used before E or I in Italian for [ʃ], and in French and Spanish as etymological alternate to [s].
- SCI: used in Italian for [ʃ] before A, O, or U.
- SH: used in Aranese for ʃ
- SS: used in Italian, French, Portuguese and Catalan for [s] between vowels.
- TH: used in Jèrriais for [θ] (as in English "thick"); used in Aranese for either [t] or [tʃ]
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 [k] or [ʃ], [f], [ʀ] and [t], respectively. The voiceless palatal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ...
The voiced retroflex plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ...
Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-20, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ...
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
Etymology is the study of the origins of words. ...
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 ['nɔte] ("notes") vs notte ['nɔːte] ("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 [z], SS'S is a long [s], T'T is a long [t]. In phonetics, gemination is when a spoken consonant is doubled, so that it is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a single consonant. ...
Jèrriais is a form of Norman language spoken in Jersey in the Channel Islands. ...
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. The acute accent ( ´ ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin and Greek scripts. ...
The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), French, Catalan, Welsh, Italian, Vietnamese, Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, Portuguese and other languages. ...
This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
In linguistics, a, diaeresis, or dieresis (AE) (from Greek (diaerein), to divide) is the modification of a syllable by distinctly pronouncing one of its vowels. ...
A cedilla is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a diacritic mark to modify their pronunciation. ...
The tilde (~) is a grapheme with several uses. ...
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more letterforms are written or printed as a unit. ...
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. In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis given to certain syllables in a word. ...
Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...
A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ...
An open vowel is a vowel sound of a type used in most spoken languages. ...
A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ...
A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ...
A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ...
The open-mid vowels make a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages. ...
A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ...
Homophones are distinguished by a grave accent in Italian and French, and by an acute accent in Spanish. Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words which have the same form (orthographic/phonetic) but unrelated meaning. ...
Punctuation and spacing
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. A quill pen is made from a flight feather (preferably a primary) of a large bird, most often a goose. ...
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. Sentence, derived from Latin sententia (perception, in the subjective sense of how one feels reality is), has three common meanings: Sentence (linguistics) Sentence (mathematical logic) Open sentence (a term that mathematics teachers attempted to introduce, but not used by mathematicians) Sentence (law) Sentence (music) This is a disambiguation page — a...
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.
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. The internal classification of the Romance languages is a rather controversial topic which may not even have a correct answer. ...
Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ...
- Northern Italian (Gallo-Romance) languages:
- Italo-Dalmatian languages:
West Iberian language is the subcategory of Romance languages, including Spanish and Portugese. ...
Languages distribution in Aragon (Aragonese in red). ...
Asturian, Leonese, Astur-Leonese or Bable (Asturianu in Asturian, Llïonés in Leonese) is a Romance language spoken in some parts of the provinces of Asturias, León, Zamora and Salamanca in Spain, and in the area of Miranda de Douro in Portugal (where it is officially recognized as...
Extremaduran is a Romance language spoken by some thousands in Spain, most of them in the autonomous community of Extremadura and the province of Salamanca. ...
Fala language (SIL Code: FAX; ISO 639-2 code: roa) is a Romance language from the Portuguese-Galician subgroup spoken in Spain by about 10,500 people, of which 5,500 live in a valley of the northwestern part of Extremadura near the border with Portugal. ...
Galician (Galician: galego) is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia. ...
Ladino is a Romance language, derived mainly from Old Castilian (Spanish) and Hebrew. ...
Asia is the largest and most populous region or continent depending on the definition. ...
A satellite composite image of Africa Africa is the worlds second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia. ...
The Riverense Portuñol (also known as Bayano or Fronterizo) is a portuñol language, spoken on the border between Uruguay and Brazil, and more specifically in the region of the twin cities of Rivera (Uruguay) and SantAna do Livramento (Brazil). ...
This article is about the international language known as Spanish. ...
World map showing the Americas The Americas commonly refers to the landmass of the Western Hemisphere, consisting of the continents of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions. ...
The Andalusian dialects (also called Andaluz) of European Spanish are spoken in Andalusia. ...
Caribbean Spanish is the general name of the Spanish language dialects spoken in the Caribbean region. ...
In Cuba, Spanish has been modified from its original form. ...
This article or section contains information that has not been verified and thus might not be reliable. ...
This article or section needs a complete rewrite for the reasons listed on the talk page. ...
Puerto Rican Spanish (español puertorriqueño) is a Spanish dialect spoken in Puerto Rico and by people of Puerto Rican descent elsewhere. ...
Venezuelan Spanish is a dialect of Spanish spoken in Venezuela. ...
While Central America is politically divided into five sovereign states (excluding Panama), it is no more fragmented linguistically in Spanish than Argentina, Mexico, or Colombia. ...
The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. ...
Mexican Spanish is the form of the Spanish language spoken in Mexico by over 90% of the population. ...
Main urban centers of Rioplatense Spanish. ...
Catalan (Català IPA: ) a Romance language, the national and official language of Catalunya (Catalonia) (On April 3rd 06 the central government of Spain finally recognised the right to define Catalonia as a NATION on the text of the Catalan Constitution) and the Principality of Andorra. ...
Alguerese or Algherese is the variant of the Catalan language spoken in the city of Alghero, in the northwest of Sardinia. ...
Catalan dialectal map Central Catalan is the Eastern Catalan dialect with the highest demographic weight, since it is commonly spoken in densely populated areas such as the whole Barcelona province, the eastern half of Tarragona province and most part of Girona province; except for it is northern part, where there...
Catalan dialectal map Northern Catalan is an Eastern Catalan dialect mostly spoken in Northern Catalonia, but also extending in the northest part of Southern Catalonia in a transition zone with Central Catalan. ...
Ribagorçan dialect is a variant of the Catalan language, which has some transitional traits to Aragonese: Palatalization of L in PL, CL, FL groups, e. ...
Valencian (valencià ) is the historical, traditional, and official name used in the Land of Valencia (Spain) to refer to the language also known as Catalan (català ) in the Spanish Autonomous Communities of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands; in the country of Andorra; in the southern French region of the Roussillon...
The langue doïl language family in linguistics comprises Romance languages originating in territories now occupied by northern France, part of Belgium and the Channel Islands. ...
Burgundian is either of the following; An extinct language of the Germanic language group spoken by the Burgundians. ...
Champenois is a language spoken by a minority of people in France and in Belgium. ...
Franc-Comtois is a language spoken by a minority of people in Franche-Comté. It is one of the langues doïl and is a regional language of France. ...
World map showing the Americas The Americas commonly refers to the landmass of the Western Hemisphere, consisting of the continents of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions. ...
French is one of Canadas two official languages; the other is English and is the language of the majority (see Canadian English). ...
Quebec French or Québécois French is a dialect of French spoken natively by the great majority (82. ...
Acadian French (le français acadien) is a dialect of French spoken by the Acadians in the Canadian Maritimes provinces and the Saint John River Valley in northern Maine. ...
Gallo is a regional language of France, traditionally spoken in Eastern Brittany. ...
With Lorrain you may mean: Lorrain language Claude Lorrain, (Claude Gelee, ca. ...
The Norman language is a Romance language, one of the Oïl languages. ...
Jèrriais is a form of Norman language spoken in Jersey in the Channel Islands. ...
Dgèrnésiais, also known as Guernésiais, Guernsey French, Guernsey Norman French, or patois is the variety of Norman language spoken in Guernsey. ...
The Anglo-Norman language is the name given to the variety of Norman spoken by the Anglo-Normans, the descendants of the Normans who ruled England following the conquest by William of Normandy in 1066. ...
Picard is a language closely related to French, and as such is one of the larger group of Romance languages. ...
Poitevin-Saintongeais is a language spoken by a minority of people in Poitou-Charentes. ...
Walloon (Walon) is a regional Romance language spoken as a second language by some in Belgium. ...
Franco-Provençal (Francoprovençal) or Arpitan (in vernacular: patouès) (in Italian: francoprovenzale, arpitano, patois; French: francoprovençal, arpitan, patois) is a Romance language with several dialects in a linguistic sub-group separate from Langue dOïl and Langue dOc. ...
Occitan, or lenga dòc, or languedoc, is a Romance language (or group of languages), spoken mainly in the Languedoc or Occitania region in southern France. ...
The Gascon language is an Occitan dialect mostly spoken in Gascony (in the French départements of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Hautes-Pyrénées, Landes, Gers, Gironde, a part of Lot-et-Garonne, a part of Haute-Garonne, and a part of Ariège), and in the small Spanish...
Aranese (Aranés or Aranais) is a dialect of Gascon (which is part of the Occitan language group of the Romance languages), spoken in Val dAran, in Spain, where it is an official language. ...
The Limousin dialect is a Romance language akin to Provençal spoken or understood by about 400 000 people in the part of southern France known as Limousin. ...
Auvergnat is a language spoken in Auvergne, which is a historical province in the northern part of Occitania. ...
Languedocien is a Romance language akin to Provençal spoken by some people in the part of southern France known as Languedoc. ...
Provençal (Provençau in Provençal language) is one of several dialects of the Romance language Occitan, which is spoken by a minority of people in southern France and other areas of France. ...
Nicard (Niçois - French, Nissart - Niçard) is a distinct dialect of the Provençal language spoken in and around the city of Nice, or Nissa in Niçard, and the historical region Le Comté de Nice/Lou Coumtat de Nissa which is almost equivalent to the current French d...
Corsican (Corsu or Lingua Corsa) is a Romance language spoken on the island of Corsica (France), alongside French, which is the official language. ...
Gallurese (gadduresu) is a diasystem of the Sardinian language, spoken in the Gallura (Gaddura), north-eastern part of Sardinia including the town of Tempio Pausania (Tempiu). ...
Sassarese is a diasystem of the Sardinian language, spoken in Sassaris area (north-western part of Sardinia) in Italy. ...
This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ...
Sardinia [[]] (Sardegna in Italian, Sardigna, Sardinna or Sardinnia in the Sardinian language, Sardenya in Catalan), is the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea (Sicily is the largest), between Italy, Spain and Tunisia, south of Corsica. ...
Sardo Campidanese is a diasystem of the Sardinian language primarily spoken in the Province of Cagliari. ...
This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
The Gallo-Romance branch of Romance languages includes French, Oïl languages, Catalan, and Occitan, among other languages. ...
Emilio-Romagnolo (also known as Emiliano-Romagnolo) denotes a language spoken in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. ...
Ligurian is a Romance language, consisting of a group of Gallo-Italic dialects currently spoken in Liguria, northern Italy, and parts of the Mediterranean coastal zone of France, and Monaco. ...
Monégasque (or Munegascu) is a Romance language based on Zeneize, the modern Ligurian language; it is spoken in Monaco and taught in schools there. ...
The term Lombard refers to a group of related dialects spoken mainly in Northern Italy (most of Lombardy and some areas of neighbouring regions), in Southern Switzerland (Ticino and Graubünden). ...
The Piemontese language (also known as Piedmontese, Piemontèis) is a Romance language spoken in Piedmont, northwestern Italy. ...
Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken by over two million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy. ...
Vèneto is one of the twenty Regions of Italy. ...
This article or section should be merged with List of Rhaetian languages Rhaetian languages are a Romance language sub-family which includes a few languages spoken in Switzerland and North-Eastern Italy. ...
Friulian (friulano in Italian, furlan or affectionately marilenghe in Friulian) is a Romance language belonging to the Rhaetian family, spoken in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of north-east Italy. ...
Friulian Coats of Arms Friuli (Furlan: Friûl, German: Friaul, Slovenian: Furlanija) is an area in northeastern Italy, comprising the major part of the autonomous region Friuli-Venezia Giulia. ...
Ladin (Ladino in Italian, Ladin in Ladin, Ladinisch in German) is a Rhaetian language spoken in the Dolomite mountains in Italy, between the regions of Trentino-Alto Adige and Veneto. ...
360° panoramic view from Marmolada, highest peak in the Dolomites. ...
Romansh (also spelled Rumantsch, Romansch or Romanche) is one of the four national languages of Switzerland, along with German, Italian and French. ...
The Italo-Dalmatian languages include 6 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects spoken in Europe; this language group is a part of the Italo-Western Romance language family. ...
Dalmatian is an extinct Romance language formerly spoken along the Dalmatian coast of Croatia and as far south as Kotor in Montenegro. ...
Istro-Romanian is a Romance language used in a few villages in the peninsula of Istria, on the northern part of the Adriatic Sea, in Croatia. ...
Italkian is a modern English name for Judeo-Italian linguistic varieties, in use mainly between the 10th and the 19th centuries in Rome and in central and northern Italy. ...
Neapolitan (autonym: (n)napulitano; Italian: napoletano) is a Romance language spoken in the city and region of Naples, Campania (Neapolitan: Napule or Nnapule, Italian: Napoli), as well as throughout most of southern Italy including the Gaeta and Sora districts of southern Lazio, the southern part of Ascoli province in Marche...
Romanesco is a group of Romance dialects spoken in Rome and most of the surrounding regions of Lazio, Umbria, central Marche and extreme southern Tuscany in central Italy. ...
Sicilian (Lu Sicilianu, Lingua Siciliana) is the Romance language spoken in Sicily and southern Italy. ...
Sicily (Sicilia in Italian and Sicilian) is an autonomous region of Italy and the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, with an area of 25,700 sq. ...
The Eastern Romance languages, sometimes known as the Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe from the local eastern variant of Vulgar Latin. ...
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Arvantovlaxika. ...
Istro-Romanian is a Romance language used in a few villages in the peninsula of Istria, on the northern part of the Adriatic Sea, in Croatia. ...
Moglenitic (or Meglenitic) is a Romance language, similar to Aromanian, spoken in the Moglená region, located across the Pella and Kilkis prefectures of Macedonia, Greece. ...
Romanian (limba română IPA ) is the fifth of the Romance languages in terms of number of speakers. ...
Istriot is a Romance language spoken in the Western Region on the coast of the Istrian Peninsula (especially in the towns of Rovinj (Rovigno) and Vodnjan (Dignano)), on the upper northern part of the Adriatic Sea, in Croatia. ...
Mozarabic was a continuum of closely related Iberian Romance dialects spoken in Muslim dominated areas of the Iberian Peninsula during the early stages of Romance languages development in Iberia. ...
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. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
// A creole language, or just creole, is a well-defined and stable language that originated from a non-trivial combination of two or more languages, typically with many distinctive features that are not inherited from either parent. ...
A mixed language is a language that arises when two languages are in contact and there is a high degree of bilingualism among speakers. ...
The Riverense Portuñol (also known as Bayano or Fronterizo) is a portuñol language, spoken on the border between Uruguay and Brazil, and more specifically in the region of the twin cities of Rivera (Uruguay) and SantAna do Livramento (Brazil). ...
Proposed subfamilies Here are some of the subfamiles that have been proposed within the various classification schemes for Romance languages: The formation of Iberian Romance languages followed more or less this process: A common Romance language with dialectal differences was spoken throughout the ancient Roman Empire. ...
Portuguese-Galician (is known as Galaico-Português or Galego-Português in Portuguese and Galaico-Portugués and Galego-Portugués in Galician) was a Iberian Romance language, spoken in the Middle Ages, in the western area of the Iberian Peninsula. ...
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. World map of colonialism at the end of the Second World War in 1945. ...
// A creole language, or just creole, is a well-defined and stable language that originated from a non-trivial combination of two or more languages, typically with many distinctive features that are not inherited from either parent. ...
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
- Lingua Franca, influenced by the Romance languages of the Western Mediterranean and Arabic.
- French-based creole languages:
- Portuguese-based creole languages
- Angolar Spoken in coastal areas of São Tomé Island, São Tomé and Príncipe.
- Annobonese Spoken in the island of Annobón, Equatorial Guinea.
- Capeverdean Crioulo (Criol, Kriolu) A dialect continuum spoken in Cape Verde.
- Daman Indo-Portuguese Spoken in Daman, India. Decreolization process occurred.
- Diu Indo-Portuguese Spoken in Diu, India. Almost extinct.
- Forro Spoken in São Tomé Island, São Tomé and Príncipe.
- Kristang Spoken in Malaysia.
- Kristi Spoken in the village of Korlay, India.
- Principense (Lunguyê) Spoken in Príncipe Island, São Tomé and Príncipe. Almost extinct.
- Macanese Spoken in Macau and Hong Kong. Decreolization process occurred.
- Papiamento Spoken in the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. Spanish influenced.
- Riverense Portuñol Spoken in Rivera (Northern Uruguay) and region. Spanish influenced.
- Saramaccan Portuguese/English Creole. Spoken in Surinam.
- Sri Lanka Indo-Portuguese Spoken in Coastal cities of Sri Lanka.
- Upper Guinea Creole (Kriol) lingua franca of Guinea-Bissau, also spoken in Casamance, Senegal.
- Spanish-based creole languages
While not being pidgins nor creoles, English (see Middle English creole hypothesis), Basque and Albanian have a substantial Romance influence in their vocabularies. Lingua franca, literally Frankish language in Italian, was originally a mixed language consisting largely of Italian plus a vocabulary drawn from Turkish, Persian, French, Greek and Arabic and used for communication throughout the Middle East. ...
A French creole, more properly French-based creole language, is a creole language with substantial influence from the French language. ...
Haitian Creole (kreyòl ayisyen) is a creole language based on the French language. ...
Antillean Creole is a French-lexified creole language spoken primarily in the Lesser Antilles. ...
Kreyol Lwiziyen is a French-based creole spoken in Louisiana. ...
Official language(s) English and French Capital Baton Rouge Largest city New Orleans at last census; probably Baton Rouge since Hurricane Katrina Area - Total - Width - Length - % water - Latitude - Longitude Ranked 31st 134,382 km² 210 km 610 km 16 29°N to 33°N 89°W to 94°W Population...
Mauritian Creole is a creole language or dialect from Mauritius. ...
Seychellois Creole, also known as Kreol, is the lingua franca of the Seychelles, as well as being an official language with English and French, unlike Mauritian Creole, which has no official status in Mauritius. ...
Lanc-Patuá is a creole language spoken in the state of Amapá in Brazil, primarily around the capital, Macapá. It is a French-based creole, spoken by immigrants from French Guiana and the Caribbean, and their descendants. ...
Flag of Amapá See other Brazilian States Capital Macapá Largest City Macapá Area 142 816 km² Population - Total - Density 477 032 3. ...
Map of Central America and the Caribbean The Caribbean Sea is a tropical body of water adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean and southeast of the Gulf of Mexico. ...
Portuguese creoles are creole languages which have been significantly influenced by Portuguese. ...
Angolar, also Ngola (called Lungua Ngolá) is minority language of São Tomé and PrÃncipe, spoken in the southernmost towns of São Tomé island and sparsely along the coast. ...
Rainforest trekking is one of the islands attractions São Tomé Island is, at 854 km², the largest island of São Tomé and PrÃncipe and is home to 96% of the nations population. ...
The Annobonese language, called by its speakers Fá dAmbô or Fla dAmbu, is spoken by 9,000 in the Ano Bom and Fernando Póo Islands off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, mostly by people of mixed African, Spanish, and Portuguese descent. ...
Annobón (or Annabon; from Ano bom Portuguese for Good Year) is an island south of São Tomé Island (São Tomé and PrÃncipe), in the Gulf of Guinea, 1° 24 S. and 5° 35 E., belonging to Equatorial Guinea. ...
The Capeverdean Crioulo is a dialect continuum spoken on the islands of Cape Verde, whose extremes lie at the islands of Santiago and that of Santo Antão. ...
A dialect continuum is a range of dialects spoken across a large geographical area, differing only slightly between areas that are geographically close, and gradually decreasing in mutual intelligibility as the distances become greater. ...
The Daman Indo-Portuguese language or Daman Portuguese creole, called by its speakers LÃngua da Casa (Portuguese for Home language) is spoken in Daman. ...
Daman and Diu (Portuguese: Gujarati is the main language; use of Portuguese is declining because it is not official or taught at school (but still spoken by 10% in Daman). ...
The Diu Indo-Portuguese language or Diu Portuguese Creole (in Portuguese lÃngua dos velhos, Elders Language) was spoken in Diu, India. ...
Daman and Diu (Portuguese: Gujarati is the main language; use of Portuguese is declining because it is not official or taught at school (but still spoken by 10% in Daman). ...
Forro is a Portuguese-based creole language spoken in São Tomé and PrÃncipe. ...
Papiá Kristang (Christian language) is a creole language. ...
Kristi is the language of some 1,000 Cristians in an isolated area around the village of Korlai in Raigad District of Maharashtra state, India. ...
The Principense language, called lunguyê (Language of the Island) by its speakers, is is spoken by a couple of thousand speakers in São Tomé and PrÃncipe, mostly elderly women, almost all of them on the island of PrÃncipe. ...
PrÃncipe is the smaller of the two major islands of São Tomé and PrÃncipe. ...
The Macanese language (Patuá to its speakers, Macaista Chapado in portuguese) was originally spoken in Macau, mainly by people of partial Portuguese ancestry (Macaneses). ...
Papiamento or Papiamentu is the primary language spoken on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao (the so-called ABC islands). ...
The Riverense Portuñol (also known as Bayano or Fronterizo) is a portuñol language, spoken on the border between Uruguay and Brazil, and more specifically in the region of the twin cities of Rivera (Uruguay) and SantAna do Livramento (Brazil). ...
Rivera is the capital of the department of Rivera in Uruguay. ...
Saramaccan (autonym: Saamáka) is a creole spoken by about 24,000 people near the Saramaccan and upper Suriname Rivers in Suriname, and 2,000 in French Guiana. ...
Burgher can refer to: A title. ...
Kriol (crioulo in Portuguese) is a language spoken by 60% of the population of Guinea-Bissau, where it is the lingua franca, and also in Senegal. ...
Flag of Casamance Casamance is the area of Senegal south of The Gambia including the Casamance River. ...
A number of Creole languages are based on the Spanish language. ...
Chavacano, (also Chabacano or Zamboangueño), is a Spanish creole spoken in the Philippines. ...
Zamboanga refers to a place in western Mindanao in the Philippines. ...
Cavite is a province of the Philippines located on the southern shores of Manila Bay in the CALABARZON region in Luzon, just 30 kilometers south of Manila. ...
Palenquero (also Palenque) is a Spanish-based Creole spoken in Colombia. ...
Papiamento or Papiamentu is the primary language spoken on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao (the so-called ABC islands). ...
Spanglish, a portmanteau of the words Spanish and English, is a name used to refer to a range of language-contact phenomena, primarily in the speech of the Hispanic population of the United States, which is exposed to both Spanish and English. ...
Yanito is the name for the patois or creole spoken in Gibraltar. ...
The Middle English creole hypothesis is the conjecture that the English language is a creole, ie. ...
Basque (in Basque: Euskara) is the language spoken by the Basque people who inhabit the Pyrenees in North-Central Spain and the adjoining region of South-Western France. ...
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). An artificial or constructed language (known colloquially as a conlang among aficionados), is a language whose phonology, grammar and vocabulary are specifically devised by an individual or small group, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture the way natural languages do. ...
An international auxiliary language (sometimes abbreviated as IAL or auxlang) is a language used (or to be used in the future) for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language. ...
The constructed language Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL) published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). ...
Latino sine flexione (Latin without inflections) is an auxiliary language invented by Giuseppe Peano, a mathematician in 1903. ...
The language Occidental, later Interlingue, is a planned language created by the Estonian naval officer and teacher Edgar de Wahl and published in 1922. ...
Lingua Franca Nova is an auxiliary constructed language created by Dr. C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania. ...
This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedias deletion policy. ...
Wenedyk (in English: Venedic) is a constructed language of the naturalistic kind, created by the Dutch translator Jan van Steenbergen. ...
See also Vulgar Latin, as in this political engraving at Pompeii, was the language of the ordinary people of the Roman Empire, distinct from the Classical Latin of literature. ...
The formation of Iberian Romance languages followed more or less this process: A common Romance language with dialectal differences was spoken throughout the ancient Roman Empire. ...
World map of Latin Union member states The Latin Union is an international organization of nations that use a Romance language. ...
Latin Europe Blue: Countries where a Romance language is the national language Green: Countries where a Romance language is an official language Latin Europe (Italian/Portuguese/Spanish: Europa latina; Romanian: Europa latină; French: Europe latine) is composed of those nations and areas in Europe that speak a Romance language and...
Latin America consists of the countries of South America and some of North America (including Central America and some the islands of the Caribbean) whose inhabitants mostly speak Romance languages, although Native American languages are also spoken. ...
The copula or copulae (the verb or verbs meaning to be) in all Romance languages derive from the Latin verbs sum (esse) and sto (*stare). ...
At first just one of many dialects of Iberian Romance spoken in Iberia, the dialect of Castile eventually became identified as the Spanish language (called español or castellano in Spanish). ...
External links - Orbis Latinus, site on Romance languages
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