Western Romance languages

Western Romance
Geographic
distribution:
France, Iberia, Northern Italy, and Switzerland
Linguistic classification:

Indo-European

Subdivisions:
Glottolog: west2813[1]

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Classification of Romance languages
The Romance language family (simplified)

The Western Romance languages are one of the primary subdivisions of the Romance languages. They include the Gallo-Romance and Iberian-Romance branches. The subdivision is based primarily in on the use of the "s" for pluralization. The categorization is highly problematic since Spanish and French are both within this subcategory whereas Italian is not, despite much higher lexical similarity between Italian and French and morphological similarity between Spanish and Italian.

Based on mutual intelligibility, Dalby counts a dozen languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Asturian-Leonese, Aragonese, Catalan, Gascon, Provençal, Gallo-Wallon, French, Franco-Provençal, Romansh, and Ladin.[2] This classification criterion is however problematic, due to the much higher levels of mutual intelligibility between Italic and Iberian languages than between either of these with Gallo-Romance languages.[3]

Some classifications include Italo-Dalmatian; the resulting clade is generally called Italo-Western Romance. Other classifications place Italo-Dalmatian with Eastern Romance.

Sardinian does not fit into either Western or Eastern Romance, and may have split off before either.

Today the four most-widely spoken standardized Western Romance languages are Spanish (c. 410 million native), Portuguese (c. 220 million native, another 45 million or so second-language speakers, mainly in Lusophone Africa), French (c. 75 million native speakers, another 70 million or so second-language speakers, mostly in Francophone Africa), and Catalan (c. 7.2 million native). Many of these languages have large numbers of non-native speakers; this is especially the case for French, in widespread use throughout West Africa as a lingua franca.

Gallo-Romance

Gallo-Romance includes:[4]

Gallo-Romance can include:

The Oïl languages, Arpitan and Rhaeto-Romance languages are sometimes called Gallo-Rhaetian.

Iberian-Romance

Iberian Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula include:[4]

References

  1. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Western Romance". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  2. David Dalby, 1999/2000, The Linguasphere register of the world’s languages and speech communities. Observatoire Linguistique, Linguasphere Press. Volume 2. Oxford.
  3. 1 2 Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Western Romance". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
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