Romance languages

Romance
Ethnicity Latin peoples
Geographic
distribution		 Originated in coastal Mediterranean and western Europe; now also spoken all over the Americas, much of Africa and in parts of Southeast Asia and Oceania
Linguistic classification

Indo-European

Early form
Subdivisions
ISO 639-2 / 5 roa
Linguasphere 51- (phylozone)
Glottolog roma1334[1]
world map showing countries where a Romance language is the primary or official language
European Romance languages

The Romance languages (sometimes called the Romanic languages, Latin languages, or Neo-Latin languages) are the modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the sixth and ninth centuries and that thus form a branch of the Italic languages within the Indo-European language family.

Today, around 800 million people are native speakers worldwide, mainly in Europe, Africa and the Americas, but also elsewhere. Additionally, the major Romance languages have many non-native speakers and are in widespread use as lingua francas.[2] This is especially the case for French, which is in widespread use throughout Central and West Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius and the Maghreb.

The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish (410 million), Portuguese (250 million), French (80 million), Italian (60 million), and Romanian (25 million).[3]

Because of the difficulty of imposing boundaries on a continuum, various counts of the modern Romance languages are given; for example, Dalby lists 23 based on mutual intelligibility.[4] The following, more extensive list, includes 35 current, living languages, and one recently extinct language, Dalmatian:

It should be noted that any count of the number of Romance languages should be taken as an approximation entirely dependent upon the criteria adopted for selection. Lists such as the one above are accurately interpreted as typologies, i.e. under any single label is a collection of varieties that share many features but are sufficiently distinct in detail to be considered separate languages unto themselves. By way of example, in the collection under Ligurian, an item as basic as 'mirror' can vary as much as Eastern Ligurian [ˈspet͡ʃo], Central Ligurian [ˈspedːʒu], Western Ligurian [ˈspeʎu], while 'flour' is ['fɛŋa], [fa'iŋa], ['fajna], ['faɹina], [fa'ina] or [fa'rejŋna], depending upon the locale. Similar differences can be present in syntax and morphology.

Origins

Romance languages are the continuation of Vulgar Latin, the popular and colloquial sociolect of Latin spoken by soldiers, settlers, and merchants of the Roman Empire, as distinguished from the classical form of the language spoken by the Roman upper classes, the form in which the language was generally written. Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language in continental Western Europe. Latin also exerted a strong influence in southeastern Britain, the Roman province of Africa, western Germany, Pannonia and the Balkans north of the Jireček Line.

During the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and collapse in the fifth century, varieties of Latin began to diverge within each local area at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. The colonial empires established by Portugal, Spain, and France from the fifteenth century onward spread their languages to the other continents to such an extent that about two-thirds of all Romance language speakers today live outside Europe.

Despite other influences (e.g. substratum from pre-Roman languages, especially Continental Celtic languages; and superstratum from later Germanic or Slavic invasions), the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin. However, some notable differences occur between today's Romance languages and their Roman ancestor. With only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the declension system of Latin and, as a result, have SVO sentence structure and make extensive use of prepositions.

Name

Romance languages in Europe

The term Romance comes from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice, derived from Romanicus: for instance, in the expression romanice loqui, "to speak in Roman" (that is, the Latin vernacular), contrasted with latine loqui, "to speak in Latin" (Medieval Latin, the conservative version of the language used in writing and formal contexts or as a lingua franca), and with barbarice loqui, "to speak in Barbarian" (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the Roman Empire).[5] From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice, or "in the Roman vernacular".

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

Samples

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

English: She always closes[6] the window before she dines / before dining.[7]

Latin (Ea) semper antequam cenat fenestram claudit.
Vulgar Latin (Ea) claudi[t] semper illa fenestra antequam de cenare
Apulian (Jèdde) akjude sèmbe la fenèstre prime de mangè.
Aragonese (Ella) zarra siempre a finestra antes de cenar.
Aromanian (Ea/Nâsa) ãncljidi/nkidi totna firida/fireastra ninti di tsinã.
Asturian (Ella) pieslla siempres la ventana enantes de cenar.
Bolognese (Lî) la sèra sänper la fnèstra prémma ed dsnèr.
Catalan (Ella) sempre tanca/clou la finestra abans de sopar.
Corsican Ella chjode/chjude sempre u purtellu nanzu di cenà (Northern Corsican); Edda/Idda sarra sempri u purteddu nanzu di cinà (Southern Corsican).
Emilian (Lē) la sèra sèmpar sù la fnèstra prima ad snàr.
Extremaduran (Ella) afecha siempri la ventana antis de cenal.
Franco-Provençal (Le) sarre toltin/tojor la fenétra avan de goutâ/dinar/sopar.
French Elle ferme toujours la fenêtre avant de dîner/souper.
Friulian (Jê) e siere simpri il barcon prin di cenâ.
Galician (Ela) pecha/fecha sempre a fiestra/xanela antes de cear.
Gallurese Idda chjude sempri lu balconi primma di cinà.
Italian (Ella/Lei) chiude sempre la finestra prima di cenare.
Judaeo-Spanish .אֵלייה סֵירּה סײֵמפּרֵי לה בֵֿינטאנה אנטֵיס דֵי סֵינאר‎; Ella cerra siempre la ventana antes de cenar.
Ladin (Ëra) stlüj dagnora la finestra impröma de cenè. (badiot) (Ëila) stluj for l viere dan maië da cëina. (gherdëina)

Centro Cadore: La sera sempre la fenestra gnante de disna. Auronzo di Cadore: La sera sempro la fenestra davoi de disnà.

Leonese (Eilla) pecha siempre la ventana primeiru de cenare.
Ligurian (Le) a saera sempre u barcun primma de cenà.
Lombard (east.)
(Bergamasque) 		(Lé) la sèra sèmper sö la finèstra prima de senà.
Lombard (west.) (Lee) la sara sù semper la finestra primma de disnà/scenà.
Magoua (Elle) à fàrm toujour là fnèt àvan k'à manj.
Milanese (Le) la sara semper sü la finestra prima de disnà.
Mirandese (Eilha) cerra siempre la bentana/jinela atrás de jantar.
Mozarabic إليا كلودت سامبرا لا فينسترا أبنتا دا جنارا. (reconstructed)
Mozarabic Ella cloudet sempre la fainestra abante da cenare. (reconstructed)
Neapolitan Essa nzerra sempe 'a fenesta primma 'e magnà.
Norman Lli barre tréjous la crouésie devaunt de daîner.
Occitan (Ela) barra/tanca sempre/totjorn la fenèstra abans de sopar.
Picard Ale frunme tojours l’ creusèe édvint éd souper.
Piedmontese Chila a sara sèmper la fnestra dnans ëd fé sin-a/dnans ëd siné.
Portuguese (Ela) fecha sempre a janela antes de jantar.
Romagnol (Lia) la ciud sëmpra la fnèstra prëma ad magnè.
Romanian Ea închide întotdeauna fereastra înainte de a cina.
Romansh Ella clauda/serra adina la fanestra avant ch'ella tschainia.
Southern Sardinian Issa serrat semp(i)ri sa bentana in antis de cenài
Northern Sardinian Issa serrat semper sa bentana in antis de chenàre.
Sassarese Edda sarra sempri lu balchoni primma di zinà.
Sicilian Iḍḍa chiui sempri la finesṭṛa anti ca pistìa/mancia.
Spanish (Ella) siempre cierra la ventana antes de cenar.
Tuscan Lei serra sempre la finestra avanti cena.
Umbrian Essa chjude sempre la finestra prima de cena'.
Venetian Eła ła sara/sera sempre ła fenestra vanti de xenàr/disnar.
Walloon Ele sere todi li finiesse divant di soper.

Romance-based creoles and pidgins

Haitian Creole Li toujou' fèmen fenêt'-la avant li manger.
Mauritian Creole Li touzour pou ferm lafnet la avan (li) manze.
Seychellois Creole Y pou touzour ferm lafnet aven y manze.
Chabacano Ta cerrá él con el puerta antes de cená.
Papiamento E muhe closes e porta promé na dine.
Cape Verdean Creole Êl fechâ porta antes de jantâ.

Some of the divergence comes from semantic change: where the same root word has 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 finiestra in Spanish, or dropped out of use entirely. The Spanish and Portuguese terms defenestrar meaning "to throw through a window" and fenestrado meaning "replete with windows" also have the same root, but are later borrowings from Latin.

Likewise, Portuguese also has the word cear, a cognate of Italian cenare and Spanish cenar, but uses it in the sense of "to have a late supper" in most varieties, while the preferred word for "to dine" is jantar (related to archaic Spanish yantar "to eat") because of semantic changes in the 19th century. Galician has both fiestra (from medieval fẽestra, the ancestor of standard Portuguese fresta) and the less frequently used ventá and xanela.

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

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

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

History

Vulgar Latin

Documentary evidence is limited about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers, more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. In Western Europe, Latin gradually replaced Celtic and Italic languages, which were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin. Commonalities in syntax and vocabulary facilitated the adoption of Latin.[8][9][10]

Vulgar Latin is believed to have already had most of the features shared by all Romance languages, which distinguish them from Classical Latin, such as the almost complete loss of the Latin grammatical case system and its replacement by prepositions; the loss of the neuter grammatical gender and comparative inflections; replacement of some verb paradigms by innovations (e.g. the synthetic future gave way to an originally analytic strategy now typically formed by infinitive + evolved present indicative forms of 'have'); the use of articles; and the initial stages of the palatalization of the plosives /k/, /g/, and /t/.

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. Both were mutually intelligible as one and the same language, which was true until very approximately the second half of the 7th century. However, within two hundred years Latin became a dead language since "the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them,"[11] i.e. Latin had ceased to be a first language and became a foreign language that had to be learned, if the label Latin is constrained to refer to a state of the language frozen in past time and restricted to linguistic features for the most part typical of higher registers.

Fall of the Western Roman Empire

During the political decline of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, there were large-scale migrations into the empire, and the Latin-speaking world was fragmented into several independent states. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by the Germanic and Slavic tribes, as well as by the Huns, which isolated the Vlachs from the rest of Romance-speaking Europe.

British and African Romance, the forms of Vulgar Latin used in southeastern Britain and the Roman province of Africa, where it had been spoken by much of the urban population, disappeared in the Middle Ages (as did Pannonian Romance in what is now Hungary and 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.

Early Romance

Over the course of the fourth to eighth centuries, Vulgar Latin, by this time highly dialectalized, broke up into discrete languages that were no longer mutually intelligible.[12]:5 Clear evidence of Latin change comes from the Reichenau Glosses, an eighth-century compilation of about 1,200 words from the fourth-century Vulgate of Jerome) that were no longer intelligible along with their eighth-century equivalents in proto-Franco-Provençal. The following are some examples with reflexes in several modern, closely related Romance languages for comparison:

English Classical / 4th cent.
(Vulgate) 		8th cent.
(Reichenau) 		Franco-Provençal French Romansh Italian Spanish Portuguese Romanian Catalan Sardinian
once semel una vice una fês une fois (ina giada) (una volta) una vez uma vez (odată) una vegada
(un cop,
una volta) 		(una borta)
children liberi infantes enfants enfants unfants (bambini) /
infanti		 (niños) /
infantes 		(crianças) (copii) (nens, etc.) /
infants 		(pipius) / (pitzinnos)
to blow flare suflare soflar souffler suflar soffiare soplar soprar (a) sufla (bufar) sulai / sulare
to sing canere cantare çhantar chanter chantar cantare cantar cantar (a) cânta cantar cantai / cantare
the best (plur.) melior meliores los mèljörs les meilleurs ils megliers i migliori los mejores os melhores (optimi,
cei mai buni) 		els millors is mellus / sos menzus
beautiful pulchra bella bèla belle bella bella (hermosa, bonita) /
bella 		bela /
(formosa/bonita) 		frumoasă (bonica) /
bella 		bella
in the mouth in ore in bucca en la boçhe dans la bouche in la bucca nella bocca en la boca na boca[13] (a îmbuca)[14] a la boca in sa buca
winter hiems hibernus hìvern hiver inviern inverno invierno inverno iarnă hivern ierru / iberru

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; but if so, they must 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",[12]:6 successfully imposed Classical Latin as an artificial written vernacular for Western Europe. Unfortunately, this meant that parishioners could no longer understand the sermons of their priests, forcing the Council of Tours in 813 to issue an edict that priests needed to translate their speeches into the rustica romana lingua, an explicit acknowledgement of the reality of the Romance languages as separate languages from Latin.[12]:6 By this time, and possibly as early as the 6th century according to Price (1984),[12]:6 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 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. The critical period between the 5th–10th centuries AD is poorly documented because little or no writing from the chaotic "Dark Ages" of the 5th–8th centuries has survived, and writing after that time was in consciously classicized Medieval Latin, with vernacular writing only beginning in earnest in the 11th or 12th centuries.

Recognition of the vernaculars

Between the 10th and 13th centuries, some local vernaculars developed a written form and began to supplant Latin in many of its roles. In some countries, such as Portugal, this transition was expedited by force of law; whereas in others, such as Italy, many prominent poets and writers used the vernacular of their own accord – some of the most famous in Italy being Giacomo da Lentini and Dante Alighieri.

Uniformization and standardization

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. In France, for instance, the dialect spoken in the region of Paris gradually spread to the entire country, and the Occitan of the south lost ground.

Modern status

Romance languages, 20th-century
Number of native speakers of each Romance language, as fractions of the total 690 million (2007)

The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish (Castilian), followed by Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries.

Romance languages in the World

French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of the European Union. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan are the official languages of the Latin Union; and French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the United Nations. Outside Europe, French, Portuguese and Spanish are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that emerged from the respective colonial empires. Spanish is an official language 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 it is the official language of Equatorial Guinea, but has few native speakers there.

Portuguese, in its original homeland, Portugal, is spoken by virtually the entire population of 10 million. As the official language of Brazil, it is spoken by more than 200 million people in that country, as well as by neighboring residents of eastern Paraguay and northern Uruguay, accounting for a little more than half the population of South America. It 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 first language by perhaps 30 million residents of that continent.[15] In Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages in East Timor and Macau, while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia—some 400,000[16]—are in Japan due to return immigration of Japanese Brazilians. In North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language.[17] In Oceania, Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in East Timor. Its closest relative, Galician, has official status in the autonomous community of Galicia in Spain, together with Spanish.

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. 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. French also has official status in much of Africa, but relatively few native speakers. In France's overseas possessions, native use of French is increasing.

Although Italy also had some colonial possessions before World War II, its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial domination. As a result, Italian outside of Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia. In some former Italian colonies in Africa—namely Libya, Eritrea and Somalia—it is spoken by a few educated people in commerce and government. Romania did not establish a colonial empire, but beyond its native territory in Southeastern Europe, it also spread to other countries on the Mediterranean (especially the other Romance countries, most notably Italy and Spain), and elsewhere such as Israel, where it is the native language of five percent of the population,[18] and is spoken by many more as a secondary language; this is due to the large numbers of Romanian-born Jews who moved to Israel after World War II.[19] Some 2.6 million people in the former Soviet republic of Moldova speak a variety of Romanian, called variously Moldovan or Romanian by them.

The total native speakers of Romance languages are divided as follows (with their ranking within the languages of the world in brackets):[20][21]

Catalan is the official language of Andorra. In Spain, it is co-official with Spanish (Castilian) in Catalonia, the Valencian Community, and the Balearic Islands, and it is recognized, but not official, in La Franja, in Aragon. In addition, it is spoken by many residents of Alghero, on the island of Sardinia, and it is co-official in that city. Galician, with more than a million native speakers, is official together with Spanish in Galicia, and has legal recognition in neighbouring territories in Castilla y León. A few other languages have official recognition on a regional or otherwise limited level; for instance, Asturian and Aragonese in Spain; Mirandese in Portugal; Friulan, Sardinian and Franco-Provençal in Italy; and Romansh in Switzerland.

The remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact. National governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well as a potential source of separatist movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it, by extensively promoting the use of the official language, restricting the use of the "other" languages in the media, characterizing them as mere "dialects", or even persecuting them. As a result, all of these languages are considered endangered to varying degrees according to the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages, ranging from "vulnerable" (e.g. Sicilian and Venetian) to "severely endangered" (Arpitan, 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. Yet it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of minority Romance languages.

Chart of Romance languages based on structural and comparative criteria, not on socio-functional ones. FP: Franco-Provençal, IR: Istro-Romanian.
Eastern and Western Romance areas split by the La Spezia–Rimini Line

The classification of the Romance languages is inherently difficult, because most of the linguistic area is a dialect continuum, and in some cases political biases can come into play. Along with Latin (which is not included among the Romance languages) and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, they make up the Italic branch of the Indo-European family.[22]

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Latin
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Classical Latin
 
 
 
Vulgar Latin
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Continental Romance
 
 
 
 
 
Sardinian language
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Italo-Western
 
African Romance
 
Eastern Romance
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Western Romance
 
 
 
 
 
Proto-Italian
 
Balkan Romance
 
Dalmatian
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Ibero-Romance
 
 
 
 
 
Gallo-Romance
 
Italian
 
Proto-Romanian
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Portuguese
 
Spanish
 
Occitano-Romance
 
French
 
Romanian
 
Aromanian
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Catalan
 
Occitan
 
 
 
 

Proposed divisions

Extent of variation in development (very conservative to very innovative)
Form
("to sing") 		Latin Nuorese
Sardinian 		Italian Spanish Portuguese Central
Catalan 		Romanian French
Infinitive cantāre cantare
[kanˈtare̞] 		cantare
[kanˈtare] 		cantar
[kanˈtar] 		cantar
[kɐ̃ˈtar] 1 		cantar
[kənˈta] 		cânta(re)
[kɨnˈta(re̞)] 		chanter
[ʃɑ̃ˈte]
Past part. cantātum cantatu
[kanˈtatu] 		cantato
[kanˈtato] 		cantado
[kanˈtaðo̞] 		cantado
[kɐ̃ˈtadu] 		cantat
[kənˈtat] 		cântat
[kɨnˈtat] 		chanté
[ʃɑ̃ˈte]
Gerund cantandum cantande
[kanˈtande̞] 		cantando
[kanˈtando] 		cantando
[kanˈtando̞] 		cantando
[kɐ̃ˈtɐ̃du] 		cantant
[kənˈtan] 		cântând
[kɨnˈtɨnd] 		chantant
[ʃɑ̃ˈtɑ̃]
1s indic. cantō canto
[ˈkanto̞] 		canto
[ˈkanto] 		canto
[ˈkanto̞] 		canto
[ˈkɐ̃tu] 		canto
[ˈkantu] 		cânt
[ˈkɨnt] 		chante
[ˈʃɑ̃t]
2s indic. cantās cantas
[ˈkantaza] 		canti
[ˈkanti] 		cantas
[ˈkantas] 		cantas
[ˈkɐ̃tɐʃ] 		cantes
[ˈkantəs] 		cânți
[ˈkɨntsʲ] 		chantes
[ˈʃɑ̃t]
3s indic. cantat cantat
[ˈkantata] 		canta
[ˈkanta] 		canta
[ˈkanta] 		canta
[ˈkɐ̃tɐ] 		canta
[ˈkantə] 		cântă
[ˈkɨntə] 		chante
[ˈʃɑ̃t]
1p indic. cantāmus cantamus
[kanˈtamuzu] 		cantiamo
[kanˈtjamo] 		cantamos
[kanˈtamo̞s] 		cantamos
[kɐ̃ˈtɐmuʃ] 		cantem
[kənˈtɛm] 		cântăm
[kɨnˈtəm] 		chantons
[ʃɑ̃ˈtɔ̃]
2p indic. cantātis cantates
[kanˈtate̞ze̞] 		cantate
[kanˈtate] 		cantáis
[kanˈtais] 		cantais
[kɐ̃ˈtajʃ] 		canteu
[kənˈtɛw] 		cântați
[kɨnˈtatsʲ] 		chantez
[ʃɑ̃ˈte]
3p indic. cantant cantant
[ˈkantana] 		cantano
[ˈkantano] 		cantan
[ˈkantan] 		cantam
[ˈkɐ̃tɐ̃w̃] 		canten
[ˈkantən] 		cântă
[ˈkɨntə] 		chantent
[ˈʃɑ̃t]
1s sbjv cantem cante
[ˈkante̞] 		canti
[ˈkanti] 		cante
[ˈkante̞] 		cante
[ˈkɐ̃t(ə)] 		canti
[ˈkanti] 		cânt
[ˈkɨnt] 		chante
[ˈʃɑ̃t]
2s sbjv cantēs cantes
[ˈkante̞ze̞] 		canti
[ˈkanti] 		cantes
[ˈkante̞s] 		cantes
[ˈkɐ̃t(ə)ʃ] 		cantis
[ˈkantis] 		cânți
[ˈkɨntsʲ] 		chantes
[ˈʃɑ̃t]
3s sbjv cantet cantet
[ˈkante̞te̞] 		canti
[ˈkanti] 		cante
[ˈkante̞] 		cante
[ˈkɐ̃t(ə)] 		canti
[ˈkanti] 		cânte
[ˈkɨnte̞] 		chante
[ˈʃɑ̃t]
1p sbjv cantēmus cantemus
[kanˈte̞muzu] 		cantiamo
[kanˈtjamo] 		cantemos
[kanˈte̞mo̞s] 		cantemos
[kɐ̃ˈtemuʃ] 		cantem
[kənˈtɛm] 		cântăm
[kɨnˈtəm] 		chantions
[ʃɑ̃ˈtjɔ̃]
2p sbjv cantētis cantetis
[kanˈte̞dizi] 		cantiate
[kanˈtjate] 		cantéis
[kanˈte̞is] 		canteis
[kɐ̃ˈtejʃ] 		canteu
[kənˈtɛw] 		cântați
[kɨnˈtatsʲ] 		chantiez
[ʃɑ̃ˈtje]
3p sbjv cantent cantent
[ˈkante̞ne̞] 		cantino
[ˈkantino] 		canten
[ˈkante̞n] 		cantem
[ˈkɐ̃tẽj̃] 		cantin
[ˈkantin] 		cânte
[ˈkɨnte̞] 		chantent
[ˈʃɑ̃t]
2s impv. cantā canta
[ˈkanta] 		canta
[ˈkanta] 		canta
[ˈkanta] 		canta
[ˈkɐ̃tɐ] 		canta
[ˈkantə] 		cântă
[ˈkɨntə] 		chante
[ˈʃɑ̃t]
2p impv. cantāte cantate
[kanˈtate̞] 		cantate
[kanˈtate] 		cantad
[kanˈtað] 		cantai
[kɐ̃ˈtaj] 		canteu
[kənˈtɛw] 		cântați
[kɨnˈtatsʲ] 		chantez
[ʃɑ̃ˈte]
1 Also [ɾ̥ r̥ ɻ̝̊ x χ ħ] are all possible allophones of [ɾ] in this position.

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

Italo-Western vs. Eastern vs. Sardinian

The main subfamilies that have been proposed by Ethnologue within the various classification schemes for Romance languages are:

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

Outcome of Classical Latin vowels
Classical Latin Proto-Romance Sardinian Eastern Romance Italo-Western
short A /a/ /a//a/ /a/
long A
short E /ɛ/ /e/ /ɛ/ /ɛ/
long E /e/ /e//e/
short I /ɪ/ /i/
long I /i/ /i/ /i/
short O /ɔ/ /o//o/ /ɔ/
long O /o/ /o/
short U /ʊ/ /u//u/
long U /u/ /u/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sardinian does not fit well at all into this sort of division. It is clear that Sardinian became linguistically independent from the remainder of the Romance languages at an extremely early date, possibly already by the first century BC. Sardinian contains a large number of archaic features, including total lack of palatalization of /k/ and /g/ and a large amount of vocabulary preserved nowhere else, including some items already archaic by the time of Classical Latin (first century BC). Sardinian has plurals in /s/ but post-vocalic lenition of voiceless consonants is normally limited to the status of an allophonic rule (e.g. [k]ane 'dog' but su [g]ane or su [ɣ]ane 'the dog'), and there are a few innovations unseen elsewhere, such as a change of /au/ to /a/. Use of su < ipsum as an article is a retained archaic feature that also exists in the Catalan of the Balearic Islands and that used to be more widespread in Occitano-Romance, and is known as article salat (literally the "salted article"), while Sardinia shares delabialization of earlier /kw/ and /gw/ with Romania: Sard. abba, Rum. apă 'water'; Sard. limba, Rom. limbă 'language' (cf. Italian acqua, lingua).

Gallo-Romance languages

Gallo-Romance can be divided into the following subgroups:

The following groups are also sometimes considered part of Gallo-Romance:

The Gallo-Romance languages are generally considered the most innovative (least conservative) among the Romance languages. Characteristic Gallo-Romance features generally developed earliest and appear in their most extreme manifestation in the Langue d'oïl, gradually spreading out along riverways and transalpine roads.

In some ways, however, the Gallo-Romance languages are conservative. The older stages of many of the languages preserved a two-case system consisting of nominative and oblique, fully marked on nouns, adjectives and determiners, inherited almost directly from the Latin nominative and accusative and preserving a number of different declensional classes and irregular forms. The languages closest to the oïl epicenter preserve the case system the best, while languages at the periphery lose it early.

Notable characteristics of the Gallo-Romance languages are:

Pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages

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

Creoles of French:

Creoles of Spanish:

Creoles of Portuguese:

Auxiliary and constructed languages

Latin and the Romance languages have also served as the inspiration and basis of numerous auxiliary and constructed languages, so-called "neo-romantic languages".[24][25]

The concept was first developed in 1903 by Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano, under the title Latino sine flexione.[26] He wanted to create a naturalistic international language, as opposed to an autonomous constructed language like Esperanto or Volapuk which were designed for maximal simplicity of lexicon and derivation of words. Peano used Latin as the base of his language, because at the time of his flourishing it was the de facto international language of scientific communication.

Other languages developed since include Idiom Neutral, Occidental, Lingua Franca Nova, and most famously and successfully, 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. These include Brithenig (which mirrors Welsh), Breathanach[27] (mirrors Irish), Wenedyk (mirrors Polish), Þrjótrunn (mirrors Icelandic),[28] and Helvetian (mirrors German).[29]

Linguistic features

Basic features

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

Changes from Classical Latin

Loss of the case system

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

The case system was drastically reduced from the vigorous six-case system of Latin. Although four cases can be constructed for Proto-Romance nouns (nominative, accusative, combined genitive/dative, and vocative), the vocative is marginal and present only in Romanian (where it may be an outright innovation), and of the remaining cases, no more than two are present in any one language. Romanian is the only modern Romance language with case marking on nouns, with a two-way opposition between nominative/accusative and genitive/dative. Some of the older Gallo-Romance languages (in particular, Old French, Old Occitan, Old Sursilvan and Old Friulian, and in traces Old Catalan and Old Venetian) had an opposition between nominative and general oblique, and in Ibero-Romance languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in Italian (see under Case), a couple of examples are found which preserve the old nominative. As in English, case is preserved better on pronouns.

Concomitant with the loss of cases, freedom of word order was greatly reduced. Classical Latin had a generally verb-final (SOV) but overall quite free word order, with a significant amount of word scrambling and mixing of left-branching and right-branching constructions. The Romance languages eliminated word scrambling and nearly all left-branching constructions, with most languages developing a rigid SVO, right-branching syntax. (Old French, however, had a freer word order due to the two-case system still present, as well as a predominantly verb-second word order developed under the influence of the Germanic languages.) Some freedom, however, is allowed in the placement of adjectives relative to their head noun. In addition, some languages (e.g. Spanish, Romanian) have an "accusative preposition" (Romanian pe, Spanish "personal a") along with clitic doubling, which allows for some freedom in ordering the arguments of a verb.

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

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

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

Other changes

Phonology

Vowels

Every language has a different set of vowels from every other. Common characteristics are as follows:

Consonants

Most Romance languages have similar sets of consonants. The following is a combined table of the consonants of the five major Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian).

Key:

Notable changes:

Most instances of most of the sounds below that occur (or used to occur, as described above) in all of the languages are cognate. However:

Romance consonants
Bilabial Labio-
dental		 Interdental Dental/
Alveolar		 Post-
alveolar		 Palatal Velar/
Uvular		 Glottal
Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiceless
Nasal m n ɲ
Plosive p b t d k ɡ
Affricate (ts) ((dz)) tʃ (dʒ)
Fricative f v ((θ)) s z ʃ ʒ ((x)) ((h))
Rhotic ɾ,r (ʁ)
Lateral l (ʎ)
Approximant j w

Lexical stress

Word stress was rigorously predictable in classical Latin except in a very few exceptional cases, either on the penultimate syllable (second from last) or antepenultimate syllable (third from last), according to the syllable weight of the penultimate syllable. Stress in the Romance Languages mostly remains on the same syllable as in Latin, but various sound changes have made it no longer so predictable. Minimal pairs distinguished only by stress exist in some languages, e.g. Italian Papa [ˈpa.pa] "Pope" vs. papà [pa.ˈpa] "daddy", or Spanish límite [ˈli.mi.te] "[a] limit", present subjunctive limite [li.ˈmi.te] "[that] [I/he] limit" and preterite limité [li.mi.ˈte] "[I] limited".

Erosion of unstressed syllables following the stress has caused most Spanish and Portuguese words to have either penultimate or ultimate stress: e.g. Latin trēdecim "thirteen" > Spanish trece, Portuguese treze; Latin amāre "to love" > Spanish/Portuguese amar. Most words with antepenultimate stress are learned borrowings from Latin, e.g. Spanish/Portuguese fábrica "factory" (the corresponding inherited word is Spanish fragua, Portuguese frágua "forge"). This process has gone even farther in French, with deletion of all post-stressed vowels, leading to consistent, predictable stress on the last syllable: e.g. Latin Stephanum "Stephen" > Old French Estievne > French Étienne /e.ˈtjɛn/; Latin juvenis "young" > Old French juevne > French jeune /ʒœn/. This applies even to borrowings: e.g. Latin fabrica > French borrowing fabrique /fa.ˈbʀik/ (the inherited word in this case being monosyllabic forge < Pre-French *fauriga).

Other than French (with consistent final stress), the position of the stressed syllable generally falls on one of the last three syllables. Exceptions may be caused by clitics or (in Italian) certain verb endings, e.g. Italian telefonano [teˈlɛ.fo.na.no] "they telephone"; Spanish entregándomelo [en.tɾe.ˈɣan.do.me.lo] "delivering it to me"; Italian mettiamocene [meˈtːjaː.mo.tʃe.ne] "let's put some of it in there"; Portuguese dávamo-vo-lo [ˈda.vɐ.mu.vu.lu] "we were giving it to you". Stress on verbs is almost completely predictable in Spanish and Portuguese, but less so in Italian.

Nominal morphology

Nouns, adjectives, and pronouns can be marked for gender, number and case. Adjectives and pronouns must agree in all features with the noun they are bound to.

Number

The Romance languages inherited from Latin two grammatical numbers, singular and plural; the only trace of a dual number comes from Latin ambō > Spanish and Portuguese ambos, Old Romanian îmbi > Romanian ambii, Old French ambe, Italian ambedue, entrambi.

Gender

Most Romance languages have two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. The gender of animate nouns is generally natural (i.e. nouns referring to men are generally masculine, and vice versa), but for nonanimate nouns it is arbitrary.

Although Latin had a third gender (neuter), there is little trace of this in most languages. The biggest exception is Romanian, where there is a productive class of "neuter" nouns, which include the descendants of many Latin neuter nouns and which behave like masculines in the singular and feminines in the plural, both in the endings used and in the agreement of adjectives and pronouns (e.g. un deget "one finger" vs. două degete "two fingers", cf. Latin digitus, pl. digiti).

Such nouns arose because of the identity of the Latin neuter singular -um with the masculine singular, and the identity of the Latin neuter plural -a with the feminine singular. A similar class exists in Italian, although it is no longer productive (e.g. il dito "the finger" vs. le dita "the fingers", l'uovo "the egg" vs. le uova "the eggs"). A similar phenomenon may be observed in Albanian (which is heavily Romance-influenced), and the category remains highly productive with a number of new words loaned or coined in the neuter ((një) hotel one hotel(m) vs. (tri) hotele three hotels (f)). (A few isolated nouns in Latin had different genders in the singular and plural, but this was an unrelated phenomenon; this is similarly the case with a few French nouns, such as amour, délice, orgue.)

Spanish also has vestiges of the neuter in the demonstrative adjectives: esto, eso, aquello, the pronoun ello (meaning "it") and the article lo (used to intensify adjectives). Portuguese also has neuter demonstrative adjectives: "isto", "isso", "aquilo" (meaning "this [near me]", "this/that [near you]", "that [far from the both of us]").

Remnants of the neuter, interpretable now as "a sub-class of the non-feminine gender" (Haase 2000:233), are vigorous in Italy in an area running roughly from Ancona to Matera and just north of Rome to Naples. Oppositions with masculine typically have been recategorized, so that neuter signifies the referent in general, while masculine indicates a more specific instance, with the distinction marked by the definite article. In Southeast Umbrian, for example, neuter lo pane is 'the bread', while masculine lu pane refers to an individual piece or loaf of bread. Similarly, neuter lo vinu is wine in general, while masculine lu vinu is a specific sort of wine, with the consequence that mass lo vinu has no plural counterpart, but lu vinu can take a sortal plural form li vini, referring to different types of wine. Phonological forms of articles vary by locale. [32]

Case

Latin had an extensive case system, where all nouns were declined in six cases (nominative, vocative, accusative, dative, genitive, and ablative) and two numbers. Many adjectives were additionally declined in three genders, leading to a possible 6 × 2 × 3 = 36 endings per adjective (although this was rarely the case). In practice, some category combinations had identical endings to other combinations, but a basic adjective like bonus "good" still had 14 distinct endings.

Spanish pronoun inflections
Case "I" "thou" "oneself" "he" "she" "we" "ye" "they"
Nominative yo tú — él ella nosotros nosotras vosotros vosotras ellos ellas
Disjunctive mí ti sí
Accusative me te se lo la nos os los las
Dative le les
Genitive mío tuyo suyo suyo; de él suyo; de ella nuestro vuestro suyo; de ellos suyo; de ellas
Possessive mi tu su su
With con conmigo contigo consigo con él con ella con nosotros
(archaic connosco) 		con nosotras
(archaic connosco) 		con vosotros
(archaic convosco) 		con vosotras
(archaic convosco) 		con ellos con ellas

In all Romance languages, this system was drastically reduced. In most modern Romance languages, in fact, case is no longer marked at all on nouns, adjectives and determiners, and most forms are derived from the Latin accusative case. Much like English, however, case has survived somewhat better on pronouns.

Most pronouns have distinct nominative, accusative, genitive and possessive forms (cf. English "I, me, mine, my"). Many also have a separate dative form, a disjunctive form used after prepositions, and (in some languages) a special form used with the preposition con "with" (a conservative feature inherited from Latin forms such as mēcum, tēcum, nobiscum).

Spanish inflectional classes
"boy" "girl" "man" "woman"
Singular chico chica hombre mujer
Plural chicos chicas hombres mujeres

The system of inflectional classes is also drastically reduced. The basic system is most clearly indicated in Spanish, where there are only three classes, corresponding to the first, second and third declensions in Latin: plural in -as (feminine), plural in -os (masculine), plural in -es (either masculine or feminine). The singular endings exactly track the plural, except the singular -e is dropped after certain consonants.

The same system underlines many other modern Romance languages, such as Portuguese, French and Catalan. In these languages, however, further sound changes have resulted in various irregularities. In Portuguese, for example, loss of /l/ and /n/ between vowels (with nasalization in the latter case) produces various irregular plurals (nação – nações "nation(s)"; hotel – hotéis "hotel(s)").

In French and Catalan, loss of /o/ and /e/ in most unstressed final syllables has caused the -os and -es classes to merge. In French, merger of remaining /e/ with final /a/ into [ə], and its subsequent loss, has completely obscured the original Romance system, and loss of final /s/ has caused most nouns to have identical pronunciation in singular and plural, although they are still marked differently in spelling (e.g. femme – femmes "woman – women", both pronounced /fam/).

Romanian noun inflections
Definiteness Case "boy" "girl"
Singular Plural Singular Plural
Indefinite Nominative
Accusative		 băiat băieți fată fete
Genitive
Dative		 fete
Vocative băiatule, băiete băietilor fato (fată) fetelor
Definite Nominative
Accusative		 băiatul băieții fata fetele
Genitive
Dative		 băiatului băieților fetei fetelor

Noun inflection has survived in Romanian somewhat better than elsewhere.[33]:399 Determiners are still marked for two cases (nominative/accusative and genitive/dative) in both singular and plural, and feminine singular nouns have separate endings for the two cases. In addition, there is a separate vocative case, enriched with native development and Slavic borrowings (see some examples here) and the combination of noun with a following clitic definite article produces a separate set of "definite" inflections for nouns.

The inflectional classes of Latin have also survived more in Romanian than elsewhere, e.g. om – oameni "man – men" (Latin homo – homines); corp – corpuri "body – bodies" (Latin corpus – corpora). (Many other exceptional forms, however, are due to later sound changes or analogy, e.g. casă – case "house(s)" vs. lună – luni "moon(s)"; frate – fraţi "brother(s)" vs. carte – cărţi "book(s)" vs. vale – văi "valley(s)".)

In Italian, the situation is somewhere in between Spanish and Romanian. There are no case endings and relatively few classes, as in Spanish, but noun endings are generally formed with vowels instead of /s/, as in Romanian: amico – amici "friend(s) (masc.)", amica – amiche "friend(s) (fem.)"; cane – cani "dog(s)". The masculine plural amici is thought to reflect the Latin nominative plural -ī rather than accusative plural -ōs (Spanish -os); however, the other plurals are thought to stem from special developments of Latin -ās and -ēs.

Evolution of case in various Romance languages (Latin bonus "good")
Case Latin Spanish Old French[12]:100 Old Sursilvan[33]:367 Romanian[33]:402
Masculine singular Nominative bonus bueno buens buns bun
Vocative bone
Accusative bonum buen biVn
Genitive bonī
Dative bonō
Ablative
Masculine plural Nominative bonī buenos buen biVni buni
Vocative
Accusative bonōs buens buns
Genitive bonōrum
Dative bonīs
Ablative
Feminine singular Nominative bona buena buene buna bună
Vocative
Accusative bonam
Genitive bonae bune
Dative
Ablative bonā
Feminine plural Nominative bonae buenas buenes bunas bune
Vocative
Accusative bonās
Genitive bonārum
Dative bonīs
Ablative

A different type of noun inflection survived into the medieval period in a number of western Romance languages (Old French, Old Occitan, and the older forms of a number of Rhaeto-Romance languages). This inflection distinguished nominative from oblique, grouping the accusative case with the oblique, rather than with the nominative as in Romanian.

The oblique case in these languages generally inherits from the Latin accusative; as a result, masculine nouns have distinct endings in the two cases while most feminine nouns do not.

A number of different inflectional classes are still represented at this stage. For example, the difference in the nominative case between masculine li voisins "the neighbor" and li pere "the father", and feminine la riens "the thing" vs. la fame "the woman", faithfully reflects the corresponding Latin inflectional differences (vicīnus vs. pater, fēmina vs. rēs).

A number of synchronically quite irregular differences between nominative and oblique reflect direct inheritances of Latin third-declension nouns with two different stems (one for the nominative singular, one for all other forms), most with of which had a stress shift between nominative and the other forms: li ber – le baron "baron" (barō – barōnem); la suer – la seror "sister" (soror – sorōrem); li prestre – le prevoire "priest" (presbyter – presbyterem); li sire – le seigneur "lord" (senior – seniōrem); li enfes – l'enfant "child" (infāns – infantem).[34]:36–39

A few of these multi-stem nouns derive from Latin forms without stress shift, e.g. li om – le ome "man" (homō – hominem). All of these multi-stem nouns refer to people; other nouns with stress shift in Latin (e.g. amor – amōrem "love") have not survived. Some of the same nouns with multiple stems in Old French or Old Occitan have come down in Italian in the nominative rather than the accusative (e.g. uomo "man" < homō, moglie "wife" < mulier), suggesting that a similar system existed in pre-literary Italian.

The modern situation in Sursilvan (one of the Rhaeto-Romance languages) is unique in that the original nominative/oblique distinction has been reinterpreted as a predicative/attributive distinction:[33]:381

Pronouns, determiners

As described above, case marking on pronouns is much more extensive than for nouns. Determiners (e.g. words such as "a", "the", "this") are also marked for case in Romanian.

Most Romance languages have the following sets of pronouns and determiners:

Personal pronouns

Unlike in English, a separate neuter personal pronoun ("it") generally does not exist, but the third-person singular and plural both distinguish masculine from feminine. Also, as described above, case is marked on pronouns even though it is not usually on nouns, similar to English. As in English, there are forms for nominative case (subject pronouns), oblique case (object pronouns), and genitive case (possessive pronouns); in addition, third-person pronouns distinguish accusative and dative. There is also an additional set of possessive determiners, distinct from the genitive case of the personal pronoun; this corresponds to the English difference between "my, your" and "mine, yours".

Development from Latin

The Romance languages do not retain the Latin third-person personal pronouns, but have innovated a separate set of third-person pronouns by borrowing the demonstrative ille ("that (over there)"), and creating a separate reinforced demonstrative by attaching a variant of ecce "behold!" (or "here is ...") to the pronoun.

Similarly, in place of the genitive of the Latin pronouns, most Romance languages adopted the reflexive possessive, which then serves indifferently as both reflexive and non-reflexive possessive. Note that the reflexive, and hence the third-person possessive, is unmarked for the gender of the person being referred to. Hence, although gendered possessive forms do exist—e.g. Portuguese seu (masc.) vs. sua (fem.)—these refer to the gender of the object possessed, not the possessor.

The gender of the possessor needs to be made clear by a collocation such as French la voiture à lui/elle, Portuguese o carro dele/dela, literally "the car of him/her". (In spoken Brazilian Portuguese, these collocations are the usual way of expressing the third-person possessive, since the former possessive seu carro now has the meaning "your car".)

The same demonstrative ille was borrowed to create the definite article (see below), which explains the similarity in form between personal pronoun and definite article. When the two are different, it is usually because of differing degrees of phonetic reduction. Generally, the personal pronoun is unreduced (beyond normal sound change), while the article has suffered various amounts of reduction, e.g. Spanish ella "she" < illa vs. la "the (fem.)" < -la < illa.

Clitic pronouns

Object pronouns in Latin were normal words, but in the Romance languages they have become clitic forms, which must stand adjacent to a verb and merge phonologically with it. Originally, object pronouns could come either before or after the verb; sound change would often produce different forms in these two cases, with numerous additional complications and contracted forms when multiple clitic pronouns cooccurred.

Catalan still largely maintains this system with a highly complex clitic pronoun system. Most languages, however, have simplified this system by undoing some of the clitic mergers and requiring clitics to stand in a particular position relative to the verb (usually after imperatives, before other finite forms, and either before or after non-finite forms depending on the language).

When a pronoun cannot serve as a clitic, a separate disjunctive form is used. These result from dative object pronouns pronounced with stress (which causes them to develop differently from the equivalent unstressed pronouns), or from subject pronouns.

Most Romance languages are null subject languages. The subject pronouns are used only for emphasis and take the stress, and as a result are not clitics. In French, however (as in Friulian and in some Gallo-Italian languages of northern Italy), verbal agreement marking has degraded to the point that subject pronouns have become mandatory, and have turned into clitics. These forms cannot be stressed, so for emphasis the disjunctive pronouns must be used in combination with the clitic subject forms. Friulian and the Gallo-Italian languages have actually gone further than this and merged the subject pronouns onto the verb as a new type of verb agreement marking, which must be present even when there is a subject noun phrase. (Some non-standard varieties of French treat disjunctive pronouns as arguments and clitic pronouns as agreement markers.[35])

Familiar–formal distinction

In medieval times, most Romance languages developed a distinction between familiar and polite second-person pronouns (a so-called T-V distinction), similar to the former English distinction between familiar "thou" and polite "you". As in English, this generally developed by appropriating the plural second-person pronoun to serve in addition as a polite singular. French is still at this stage, with familiar singular tu vs. formal or plural vous. In cases like this, the pronoun requires plural agreement in all cases whenever a single affix marks both person and number (as in verb agreement endings and object and possessive pronouns), but singular agreement elsewhere where appropriate (e.g. vous-même "yourself" vs. vous-mêmes "yourselves").

Many languages, however, innovated further in developing an even more polite pronoun, generally composed of a noun phrase (e.g. Portuguese vossa mercê "your mercy", progressively reduced to vossemecê, vosmecê and finally você) and taking third-person singular agreement. A plural equivalent was created at the same time or soon after (Portuguese vossas mercês, reduced to vocês), taking third-person plural agreement. Spanish innovated similarly, with usted(es) from earlier vuestra(s) merced(es).

In Portuguese and Spanish (as in other languages with similar forms), the "extra-polite" forms in time came to be the normal polite forms, and the former polite (or plural) second-person vos knocked down to a familiar form, either becoming a familiar plural (as in European Spanish) or a familiar singular (as in many varieties of Latin American Spanish). In the latter case, it either competes with the original familiar singular tu (as in Guatemala), displaces it entirely (as in Argentina), or is itself displaced (as in Mexico, except in Chiapas). In American Spanish, the gap created by the loss of familiar plural vos was filled by originally polite ustedes, with the result that there is no familiar/polite distinction in the plural, just as in the original tu/vos system.

A similar path was followed by Italian and Romanian. Romanian uses dumneavoastră "your lordship", while Italian the former polite phrase sua eccellenza "your excellency" has simply been supplanted by the corresponding pronoun Ella or Lei (literally "she", but capitalized when meaning "you"). As in European Spanish, the original second-person plural voi serves as familiar plural. (In Italy, during fascist times leading up to World War II, voi was resurrected as a polite singular, and discarded again afterwards, although it remains in some southern dialects.)

Portuguese innovated again in developing a new extra-polite pronoun o senhor "the sir", which in turn downgraded você. Hence, modern European Portuguese has a three-way distinction between "familiar" tu, "equalizing" você and "polite" o senhor. (The original second-person plural vós was discarded centuries ago in speech, and is used today only in translations of the Bible, where tu and vós serve as universal singular and plural pronouns, respectively.)

Brazilian Portuguese, however, has diverged from this system, and most dialects simply use você (and plural vocês) as a general-purpose second-person pronoun, combined with te (from tu) as the clitic object pronoun. The form o senhor (and feminine a senhora) is sometimes used in speech, but only in situations where an English speaker would say "sir" or "ma'am". The result is that second-person verb forms have disappeared, and the whole pronoun system has been radically realigned. However that is the case only in the spoken language of central and northern Brazil, with the northeastern and southern areas of the country still largely preserving the second-person verb form and the "tu" and "você" distinction.

Articles

Latin had no articles as such. The closest definite article was the non-specific demonstrative is, ea, id meaning approximately "this/that/the". The closest indefinite articles were the indefinite determiners aliquī, aliqua, aliquod "some (non-specific)" and certus "a certain".

Romance languages have both indefinite and definite articles, but none of the above words form the basis for either of these. Usually the definite article is derived from the Latin demonstrative ille ("that"), but some languages (e.g. Sardinian, and some dialects spoken around the Pyrenees) have forms from ipse (emphatic, as in "I myself"). The indefinite article everywhere is derived from the number ūnus ("one").

Some languages, e.g. French and Italian, have a partitive article that approximately translates as "some". This is used either with mass nouns or with plural nouns—both cases where the indefinite article cannot occur. A partitive article is used (and in French, required) whenever a bare noun refers to specific (but unspecified or unknown) quantity of the noun, but not when a bare noun refers to a class in general. For example, the partitive would be used in both of the following sentences:

  • I want milk.
  • Men arrived today.

But neither of these:

  • Milk is good for you.
  • I hate men.

The sentence "Men arrived today", however, (presumably) means "some specific men arrived today" rather than "men, as a general class, arrived today" (which would mean that there were no men before today). On the other hand, "I hate men" does mean "I hate men, as a general class" rather than "I hate some specific men".

As in many other cases, French has developed the farthest from Latin in its use of articles. In French, nearly all nouns, singular and plural, must be accompanied by an article (either indefinite, definite, or partitive) or demonstrative pronoun.

Due to pervasive sound changes in French, most nouns are pronounced identically in the singular and plural, and there is often heavy homophony between nouns and identically pronounced words of other classes. For example, all of the following are pronounced /sɛ̃/: sain "healthy"; saint "saint, holy"; sein "breast"; ceins "(you) put on, gird"; ceint "(he) puts on, girds"; ceint "put on, girded"; and the equivalent noun and adjective plural forms sains, saints, seins, ceints. The article helps identify the noun forms saint or sein, and distinguish singular from plural; likewise, the mandatory subject of verbs helps identify the verb ceint. In more conservative Romance languages, neither articles nor subject pronouns are necessary, since all of the above words are pronounced differently. In Italian, for example, the equivalents are sano, santo, seno, cingi, cinge, cinto, sani, santi, seni, cinti, where all vowels and consonants are pronounced as written, and ⟨s⟩ /s/ and ⟨c⟩ /t͡ʃ/ are clearly distinct from each other.

Latin, at least originally, had a three-way distinction among demonstrative pronouns distinguished by distal value: hic 'this', iste 'that (near you)', ille 'that (over there)', similar to the distinction that used to exist in English as "this" vs. "that" vs. "yon(der)". In urban Latin of Rome, iste came to have a specifically derogatory meaning, but this innovation apparently did not reach the provinces and is not reflected in the modern Romance languages. A number of these languages still have such a three-way distinction, although hic has been lost and the other pronouns have shifted somewhat in meaning. For example, Spanish has este "this" vs. ese "that (near you)" vs. aquel (fem. aquella) "that (over yonder)". The Spanish pronouns derive, respectively, from Latin iste ipse accu-ille, where accu- is an emphatic prefix derived from eccum "behold (it!)" (still vigorous in Italy as Ecco! 'Behold!'), possibly with influence from atque "and".[36]

Reinforced demonstratives such as accu-ille arose as ille came to be used as an article as well as a demonstrative. Such forms were often created even when not strictly needed to distinguish otherwise ambiguous forms. Italian, for example, has both questo "this" (eccu-istum) and quello "that" (eccu-illum), in addition to dialectal codesto "that (near you)" (*eccu-tē-istum). French generally prefers forms derived from bare ecce "behold", as in the pronoun ce "this one/that one" (earlier ço, from ecce-hoc; cf. Italian ciò 'that') and the determiner ce/cet "this/that" (earlier cest, from ecce-istum).

Reinforced forms are likewise common in locative adverbs (words such as English here and there), based on related Latin forms such as hic "this" vs. hīc "here", hāc "this way", and ille "that" vs. illīc "there", illāc "that way". Here again French prefers bare ecce while Spanish and Italian prefer eccum (French ici "here" vs. Spanish aquí, Italian qui). In western languages such as Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, doublets and triplets arose such as Portuguese aqui, acá, cá "(to) here" (accu-hīc, accu-hāc, eccu-hāc). From these, a prefix a- was extracted, from which forms like aí "there (near you)" (a-(i)bi) and ali "there (over yonder)" (a-(i)llīc) were created; compare Catalan neuter pronouns açò (acce-hoc) "this", això (a-(i)psum-hoc) "that (near you)", allò (a-(i)llum-hoc) "that (yonder)".

Subsequent changes often reduced the number of demonstrative distinctions. Standard Italian, for example, has only a two-way distinction "this" vs. "that", as in English, with second-person and third-person demonstratives combined. In Catalan, however, a former three-way distinction aquest, aqueix, aquell has been reduced differently, with first-person and second-person demonstratives combined. Hence aquest means either "this" or "that (near you)"; on the phone, aquest is used to refer both to speaker and addressee.

Old French had a similar distinction to Italian (cist/cest vs. cil/cel), both of which could function as either adjectives or pronouns. Modern French, however, has no distinction between "this" and "that": ce/cet, cette < cest, ceste is only an adjective, and celui, celle < cel lui, celle is only a pronoun, and both forms indifferently mean either "this" or "that". (The distinction between "this" and "that" can be made, if necessary, by adding the suffixes -ci "here" or -là "there", e.g. cette femme-ci "this woman" vs. cette femme-là "that woman", but this is rarely done except when specifically necessary to distinguish two entities from each other.)

Verbal morphology

Correspondence between Latin and Romance tenses
Latin Portuguese Spanish Catalan Occitan French Rhaeto-Romance Italian Romanian Sardinian
Present indicative Present indicative
Present subjunctive Present subjunctive
Imperfect indicative Imperfect indicative
Imperfect subjunctive Personal infinitive — — — — — — — Imperfect subjunctive /
Personal infinitive
Future indicative — eres ("you are") — — future of "to be"
in Old French 		— — — —
Perfect indicative Preterite Simple preterite (literary except in Valencian) Preterite Simple past (literary) — Preterite (Tuscan Standard Italian);[37]
Literary Remote Past
(Regional Standard Italian in North); Preterite/Perfect
(Regional Standard Italian in South) 		Simple past (literary except in the Oltenian dialect) In Old Sardinian;
only traces in modern lang
Perfect subjunctive —
Pluperfect indicative Literary pluperfect Imperfect subjunctive (-ra form) — Second conditional
in Old Occitan 		Second preterite
in very early Old French
(Sequence of Saint Eulalia)[38] 		— — — —
Pluperfect subjunctive Imperfect subjunctive Pluperfect indicative —
Future perfect Future subjunctive
(very much in use) 		Future subjunctive
(moribund) 		— possible traces of
future subjunctive
in Old Occitan[39] 		— — possible traces of
future subjunctive
in Old Italian 		— —
New future infinitive+habeo voleo+infinitive habeo+infinitive
New conditional infinitive+habebam infinitive+habuisset infinitive+habuit habeo+infinitive
(split apart from
infinitive+habeo
in eighteenth-century Romanian) 		habebam+infinitive
Preterite vs. present perfect
(in speech)		 preterite only
(present perfect exists,
but has different meaning)		 both both (but usually an analytic preterite
vado+infinitive is used)		 ? present perfect only present perfect only both (Tuscan Standard Italian);[37]
present perfect only
(Regional Standard Italian in North);
preference for preterite
(Regional Standard Italian in South)		 present perfect only present perfect only

Verbs have many conjugations, including in most languages:

Several tenses and aspects, especially of the indicative mood, have been preserved with little change in most languages, as shown in the following table for the Latin verb dīcere (to say), and its descendants.

Infinitive Indicative Subjunctive Imperative
Present Preterite Imperfect Present Present
Latin dīcere dīcit dīxit dicēbat dīcat/dīcet dīc
Aragonese dicir diz dició deciba/diciba diga diz
Asturian dicir diz dixo dicía diga di
Catalan dir diu/dit digué/va dir/dit deia digui/diga digues
Corsican dì dice/dici disse/dissi dicia dica/dichi dì
Emilian dîr dîs l'à détt / dgé dgeva dégga dì
Franco-Provençal dire di dè djéve dijisse/dzéze dète
French dire1 dit dit disait dise dis
Galician dicir di dixo dicía diga di
Italian di(ce)re dice disse diceva dica dì
Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino) dezir dize disho dezía diga dezí
Leonese dicire diz dixu dicía diga di
Lombard dì dis ha dii diseva disa dì
Mirandese dir diś à dit dgiva diga dì
Neapolitan dicere dice dicette diceva diche dije
Occitan díser/dire ditz diguèt disiá diga diga
Picard dire dit – disoait diche –
Piedmontese dì dis dìsser2, l'ha dit disìa disa dis
Portuguese dizer diz disse dizia diga diz3
Romanian a zice, zicere4 zice zise/a zis zicea zică zi
Romansh dir di ha ditg discheva5 dia di
Campidanese Sardinian nai/narri narat at narau naràt nergiat nara
Logudorese Sardinian narrer6 narat at naradu naraiat/nabat nerzat/niet nara
Sicilian dìciri dici dissi dicìa dica7 dici
Spanish decir dice dijo decía diga di
Venetian dir dise – disea diga dì/disi
Walloon dire dit a dit dijheut dixhe di
Basic meaning to say he says he said he was saying he says say [thou]
1The spelling is conservative. Note the pronunciations: dire /diʁ/, dit /di/, disait /dizɛ/, dise /diz/, dis /di/.
2Until the eighteenth century.
3With the disused variant dize.
4long infinitive
5In modern times, scheva.
6Derived from the unrelated Latin verb narrāre "to tell (a story)". Note also the pronunciations: narrer /ˈnarrere/, narat /ˈnarada/, at naradu /a nnaˈradu/, naraiat /narˈaiada/, nabat /ˈnabata/, nerzat /ˈnertsada/, niet /ˈniete/, nara /ˈnara/.
7Sicilian now uses imperfect subjunctive dicissi in place of present subjunctive.

The main tense and mood distinctions that were made in classical Latin are generally still present in the modern Romance languages, though many are now expressed through compound rather than simple verbs. The passive voice, which was mostly synthetic in classical Latin, has been completely replaced with compound forms.

For a more detailed illustration of how the verbs have changed with respect to classical Latin, see Romance verbs.

Note that in Catalan, the synthetic preterite is predominantly a literary tense, except in Valencian; but an analytic preterite (formed using an auxiliary vadō, which in other languages signals the future) persists in speech, with the same meaning. In Portuguese, a morphological present perfect does exist but has a different meaning (closer to "I have been doing").

The following are common features of the Romance languages (inherited from Vulgar Latin) that are different from Classical Latin:

Lexicon

Loanwords

Romance languages have borrowed heavily, though mostly from other Romance languages. However, some, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and French, have borrowed heavily from other language groups. Vulgar Latin borrowed first from indigenous languages of the Roman empire, and during the Germanic folk movements, from Germanic languages, especially Gothic; for Eastern Romance languages, during Bulgarian Empires, from Slavic languages, especially Bulgarian. Notable examples are *blancus "white", replacing native albus (but Romansh alv, Dalmatian jualb, Romanian alb); *guerra "war", replacing native bellum; and the words for the cardinal directions, where cognates of English "north", "south", "east" and "west" replaced the native words septentriō, merīdiēs (also "noon; midday nap"; cf. Romanian meriză), oriens, and occidens. (See History of French – The Franks.) Some Celtic words were incorporated into the core vocabulary, partly for words with no Latin equivalent (betulla "birch", camisia "shirt", cerevisia "beer"), but in some cases replacing Latin vocabulary (gladius "sword", replacing ensis; cambiāre "to exchange", replacing mūtāre except in Romanian and Portuguese; carrus "cart", replacing currus; pettia "piece", largely displacing pars (later resurrected) and eliminating frustum). Many Greek loans also entered the lexicon, e.g. spatha "sword" (Greek: σπάθη spáthē,[40][41] replacing gladius which shifted to "iris", cf. French épée, Spanish espada, Italian spada and Romanian spată); cara "face" (Greek: κάρα kára,[42] partly replacing faciēs); colpe "blow" (Greek: κόλαφος kólaphos,[43][44] replacing ictus, cf. Spanish golpe, French coup); cata "each" (Greek: κατά katá,[45] replacing quisque); common suffixes *-ijāre/-izāre (Greek: -ίζειν -izein,[46] French oyer/-iser, Spanish -ear/-izar, Italian -eggiare/-izzare, etc.), -ista (Greek: -ιστής -istes[47]).[48]

Lexical innovation

Many basic nouns and verbs, especially those that were short or had irregular morphology, were replaced by longer derived forms with regular morphology. Nouns, and sometimes adjectives, were often replaced by diminutives, e.g. auris "ear" > auricula (orig. "outer ear") > oricla (Sardinian origra, Italian orecchia/o, Portuguese orelha, etc.); avis "bird" > avicellus (orig. "chick, nestling") > aucellu (Occitan aucèl, Friulan ucel, French oiseau, etc.); caput "head" > capitium (Portuguese cabeça, Spanish cabeza, French chevet "headboard"; but reflexes of caput were retained also, sometimes without change of meaning, as in Italian capo "head", alongside testa); vetus "old" > vetulus > veclus (Dalmatian vieklo, Italian vecchio, Portuguese velho, etc.). Sometimes augmentative constructions were used instead: piscis "fish" > Old French peis > peisson (orig. "big fish") > French poisson. Verbs were often replaced by frequentative constructions: canere "to sing" > cantāre; iacere "to throw" > iactāre > *iectāre (Italian gettare, Portuguese jeitar, Spanish echar, etc.); iuvāre > adiūtāre (Italian aiutare, Spanish ayudar, French aider, etc., meaning "help", alongside e.g. iuvāre > Italian giovare "to be of use"); vēnārī "hunt" (Romanian "vâna", Aromanian "avin, avinari") > replaced by *captiāre "to hunt", frequentative of capere "to seize" (Italian cacciare, Portuguese caçar, Romansh catschar, French chasser, etc.).

Many Classical Latin words became archaic or poetic and were replaced by more colloquial terms: equus "horse" > caballus (orig. "nag") (but equa "mare" remains, cf. Spanish yegua, Portuguese égua, Sardinian ebba, Romanian iapă); domus "house" > casa (orig. "hut"); ignis "fire" > focus (orig. "hearth"); strāta "street" > rūga (orig. "furrow") or callis (orig. "footpath") (but strāta is continued in Italian strada, Romanian stradă and secondarily in e.g. Spanish/Portuguese estrada "causeway, paved road"). In some cases, terms from common occupations became generalized: invenīre "to find" replaced by Ibero-Romance afflāre (orig. "to sniff out", in hunting, cf. Spanish hallar, Portuguese achar, Romanian afla(to find out)); advenīre "to arrive" gave way to Ibero-Romance plicāre (orig. "to fold (sails; tents)", cf. Spanish llegar, Portuguese chegar; Romanian pleca), elsewhere arripāre (orig. "to harbor at a riverbank", cf. Italian arrivare, French arriver) (advenīre is continued with the meaning "to achieve, manage to do" as in Middle French aveindre, or "to happen" in Italian avvenire) . The same thing sometimes happened to religious terms, due to the pervasive influence of Christianity: loquī "to speak" succumbed to parabolāre (orig. "to tell parables", cf. Occitan parlar, French parler, Italian parlare ) or fabulārī (orig. "to tell stories", cf. Spanish hablar, Portuguese falar), based on Jesus' way of speaking in parables.

Many prepositions were used as verbal particles to make new roots and verb stems, e.g. Italian estrarre, Aromanian astragu, astradziri "to extract" from Latin ex- "out of" and trahere "to pull" (Italian trarre "draw, pull"), or to augment already existing words, e.g. French coudre, Italian cucire, Portuguese coser "to sew", from cōnsuere "to sew up", from suere "to sew", with total loss of the bare stem. Many prepositions and commonly became compounded, e.g. de ex > French dès "as of", ab ante > Italian avanti "forward". Some words derived from phrases, e.g. Portuguese agora, Spanish ahora "now" < hāc hōrā "at this hour"; French avec "with" (prep.) < Old French avuec (adv.) < apud hoc ("near that"); Spanish tamaño, Portuguese tamanho "size" < tam magnum "so big"; Italian codesto "this, that" (near you) < Old Italian cotevesto < eccum tibi istum approx. "here's that thing of yours"; Portuguese você "you"[49] < vosmecê < vossemecê < Galician-Portuguese vossa mercee "your mercy".[50]

A number of common Latin words that have disappeared in many or most Romance languages have survived either in the periphery or in remote corners (especially Sardinia and Romania), or as secondary terms, sometimes differing in meaning. For example, Latin caseum "cheese" in the more outer places (Portuguese queijo, Spanish queso, Romansh caschiel, Sardinian càsu, Romanian caş), but in the central areas has been replaced by formāticum, originally "moulded (cheese)" (French fromage, Occitan/Catalan formatge, Italian formaggio, with, however, cacio also available; similarly (com)edere "to eat (up)", which survives as Spanish/Portuguese comer but elsewhere is replaced by mandūcāre, originally "to chew" (French manger, Italian mangiare, Catalan menjar, but Spanish/Portuguese noun manjar "food" or "uplifting meal"). In some cases, one language happens to preserve a word displaced elsewhere, e.g. Italian ogni "each, every" < omnes, displaced elsewhere by tōtum, originally "whole" or by a reflex of Greek κατά (e.g. Italian ognuno, Catalan tothom "everyone"; Italian ogni giorno, Spanish cada día "every day"); Friulan vaî "to cry" < flere "to weep"; Vegliote otijemna "fishing pole" < antenna "yardarm"; Aromanian "sprunã" (warm ashes) < pruna (burning coal). Sardinian even preserves some words that were already archaic in Classical Latin, e.g. àchina "grape" < acinam, also found in Sicilian ràcina.

Latinisms

During the Middle Ages, scores of words were borrowed directly from Classical Latin (so-called Latinisms), either in their original form (learned loans) or in a somewhat nativized form (semi-learned loans). These resulted in many doublets—pairs of inherited and learned words—such as those in the table below:

Latin Romance Inherited Latinism
fragilis "fragile" French frêle "frail" fragile "fragile"
fabrica "craft, manufacture" French forge "forge" fabrique "factory"
fabrica Spanish fragua "forge" fábrica "factory"
fabrica Romanian făură "blacksmith (archaic)" fabrică "factory"
lēgālis "legal" French loyal "loyal" légal "legal"
lēgālis Spanish leal "loyal" legal "legal"
advōcātus "advocate (noun)" French avoué "solicitor (attorney)" avocat "barrister (attorney)"
polīre "to polish" Portuguese puir "to wear thin" polir "to polish"

Sometimes triplets arise: Latin articulus "joint" > Portuguese artículo "joint, knuckle" (learned), artigo "article" (semi-learned), artelho "ankle" (inherited; archaic and dialectal). In many cases, the learned word simply displaced the original popular word: e.g. Spanish crudo "crude, raw" (Old Spanish cruo); French légume "vegetable" (Old French leüm); Portuguese flor "flower" (Galician-Portuguese chor). The learned loan always looks more like the original than the inherited word does, because regular sound change has been bypassed; and likewise, the learned word usually has a meaning closer to that of the original. In French, however, the stress of the learned loan may be on the "wrong" syllable, whereas the stress of the inherited word always corresponds to the Latin stress: e.g. Latin vipera vs. French vipère, learned loan, and guivre/vouivre, inherited.

Borrowing from Classical Latin has produced a large number of suffix doublets. Examples from Spanish (learned form first): -ción vs. -zon; -cia vs. -za; -ificar vs. -iguar; -izar vs. -ear; -mento vs. -miento; -tud (< nominative -tūdō) vs. -dumbre (< accusative -tūdine); -ículo vs. -ejo; etc. Similar examples can be found in all the other Romance languages.

This borrowing also introduced large numbers of classical prefixes in their original form (dis-, ex-, post-, trans-) and reinforced many others (re-, popular Spanish/Portuguese des- < dis-, popular French dé- < dis-, popular Italian s- < ex-). Many Greek prefixes and suffixes (hellenisms) also found their way into the lexicon: tele-, poli-/poly-, meta-, pseudo-, -scope/scopo, -logie/logia/logía, etc.

Sound changes

Consonants

Significant sound changes affected the consonants of the Romance languages.

Apocope

There was a tendency to eliminate final consonants in Vulgar Latin, either by dropping them (apocope) or adding a vowel after them (epenthesis).

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. *lacte, *mele, *core).

Final -m was dropped in Vulgar Latin. Even in Classical Latin, final -am, -em, -um (inflectional suffixes of the accusative case) were often elided in poetic meter, suggesting the m was weakly pronounced, probably marking the nasalisation of the vowel before it. This nasal vowel lost its nasalization in the Romance languages except in monosyllables, where it became /n/ e.g. Spanish quien < quem "whom", French rien "anything" < rem "thing"; note especially French and Catalan mon < meum "my (m.sg.)" pronounced as one syllable (/meu̯m/ > */meu̯n/, /mun/) but Spanish mío and Portuguese and Catalan meu < meum pronounced as two (/ˈme.um/ > */ˈme.o/).

As a result, only the following final consonants occurred in Vulgar Latin:

Final -t was eventually dropped in many languages, although this often occurred several centuries after the Vulgar Latin period. For example, the reflex of -t was dropped in Old French and Old Spanish only around 1100. In Old French, this occurred only when a vowel still preceded the t (generally /ə/ < Latin a). Hence amat "he loves" > Old French aime but venit "he comes" > Old French vient: the /t/ was never dropped and survives into Modern French in liaison, e.g. vient-il? "is he coming?" /vjɛ̃ti(l)/ (the corresponding /t/ in aime-t-il? is analogical, not inherited). Old French also kept the third-person plural ending -nt intact.

In Italo-Romance and the Eastern Romance languages, eventually all final consonants were either dropped or protected by an epenthetic vowel, except in clitic forms (e.g. prepositions con, per). Modern Standard Italian still has almost no consonant-final words, although Romanian has resurfaced them through later loss of final /u/ and /i/. For example, amās "you love" > ame > ami; amant "they love" > *aman > amano. On the evidence of "sloppily written" Lombardic language documents, however, the loss of final /s/ in Italy did not occur until the 7th or 8th century, after the Vulgar Latin period, and the presence of many former final consonants is betrayed by the syntactic gemination (raddoppiamento sintattico) that they trigger. It is also thought that after a long vowel /s/ became /j/ rather than simply disappearing: nōs > noi "we", se(d)ēs > sei "you are", crās > crai "tomorrow" (southern Italian). In unstressed syllables, the resulting diphthongs were simplified: canēs > /ˈkanej/ > cani "dogs"; amīcās > /aˈmikaj/ > amiche /aˈmike/ "(female) friends", where nominative amīcae should produce **amice rather than amiche (note masculine amīcī > amici not **amichi).

Central Western Romance languages eventually regained a large number of final consonants through the general loss of final /e/ and /o/, e.g. Catalan llet "milk" < lactem, foc "fire" < focum, peix "fish" < piscem. In French, most of these secondary final consonants (as well as primary ones) were lost before around 1700, but tertiary final consonants later arose through the loss of /ə/ < -a. Hence masculine frigidum "cold" > Old French freit > froid /fʁwa/, feminine frigidam > Old French freide > froide /fʁwad/.

Palatalization

Palatalization was one of the most important processes affecting consonants in Vulgar Latin. This eventually resulted in a whole series of "palatal" and postalveolar consonants in most Romance languages, e.g. Italian /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/, /dʒ/, /ts/, /dz/, /ɲ/, /ʎ/.

The following historical stages occurred:

Stage Environment Consonants affected Result Languages affected
1 before /j/ (from e, i in hiatus) /t/, /d/ /tsʲ/, /jj~dzʲ~ddʒʲ/ all
2 all remaining, except labial consonants /ttʃʲ~ttsʲ/ < /kj/, /jj~ddʒʲ/ < /ɡj/, /ɲɲ/, /ʎʎ/, /Cʲ/ all except Sardinian
3 before /i/ /k/, /ɡ/ /tʃʲ~tsʲ/, /j~dʒʲ/
4 before /e/ all except Sardinian and Dalmatian
5 before /a/, /au/ /tɕ~tʃʲ/, /dʑ~dʒʲ/ north-central Gallo-Romance (e.g. French, northern Occitan); Rhaeto-Romance

Note how the environments become progressively less "palatal", and the languages affected become progressively fewer.

The outcomes of palatalization depended on the historical stage, the consonants involved, and the languages involved. The primary division is between the Western Romance languages, with /ts/ resulting from palatalization of /k/, and the remaining languages (Italo-Dalmatian and Eastern Romance), with /tʃ/ resulting. It is often suggested that /tʃ/ was the original result in all languages, with /tʃ/ > /ts/ a later innovation in the Western Romance languages. Evidence of this is the fact that Italian has both /ttʃ/ and /tts/ as outcomes of palatalization in different environments, while Western Romance has only /(t)ts/. Even more suggestive is the fact that the Mozarabic language in al-Andalus (modern southern Spain) had /tʃ/ as the outcome despite being in the "Western Romance" area and geographically disconnected from the remaining /tʃ/ areas; this suggests that Mozarabic was an outlying "relic" area where the change /tʃ/ > /ts/ failed to reach. (Northern French dialects, such as Norman and Picard, also had /tʃ/, but this may be a secondary development, i.e. due to a later sound change /ts/ > /tʃ/.) Note that /ts, dz, dʒ/ eventually became /s, z, ʒ/ in most Western Romance languages. Thus Latin caelum (sky, heaven), pronounced [ˈkai̯lu(m)] with an initial [k], became Italian cielo [ˈtʃɛlo], Romanian cer [tʃer], Spanish cielo [ˈθjelo]/[ˈsjelo], French ciel [sjɛl], Catalan cel [ˈsɛɫ], and Portuguese céu [ˈsɛw].

The outcome of palatalized /d/ and /ɡ/ is less clear:

This suggests that palatalized /d/ > /dʲ/ > either /j/ or /dz/ depending on location, while palatalized /ɡ/ > /j/; after this, /j/ > /(d)dʒ/ in most areas, but Spanish and Gascon (originating from isolated districts behind the western Pyrenees) were relic areas unaffected by this change.

In French, the outcomes of /k, ɡ/ palatalized by /e, i, j/ and by /a, au/ were different: centum "hundred" > cent /sɑ̃/ but cantum "song" > chant /ʃɑ̃/. French also underwent palatalization of labials before /j/: Vulgar Latin /pj, bj~vj, mj/ > Old French /tʃ, dʒ, ndʒ/ (sēpia "cuttlefish" > seiche, rubeus "red" > rouge, sīmia "monkey" > singe).

The original outcomes of palatalization must have continued to be phonetically palatalized even after they had developed into alveolar/postalveolar/etc. consonants. This is clear from French, where all originally palatalized consonants triggered the development of a following glide /j/ in certain circumstances (most visible in the endings -āre, -ātum/ātam). In some cases this /j/ came from a consonant palatalized by an adjoining consonant after the late loss of a separating vowel. For example, mansiōnātam > /masʲoˈnata/ > masʲˈnada/ > /masʲˈnʲæðə/ > early Old French maisnieḍe /maisˈniɛðə/ "household". Similarly, mediētātem > /mejeˈtate/ > /mejˈtade/ > /mejˈtæðe/ > early Old French meitieḍ /mejˈtʲɛθ/ > modern French moitié /mwaˈtje/ "half". In both cases, phonetic palatalization must have remained in primitive Old French at least through the time when unstressed intertonic vowels were lost (?c.8th century), well after the fragmentation of the Romance languages.

The effect of palatalization is indicated in the writing systems of almost all Romance languages, where the letters have the "hard" pronunciation [k, ɡ] in most situations, but a "soft" pronunciation (e.g. French/Portuguese [s, ʒ], Italian/Romanian [tʃ, dʒ]) before ⟨e, i, y⟩. (This orthographic trait has passed into Modern English through Norman French-speaking scribes writing Middle English; this replaced the earlier system of Old English, which had developed its own hard-soft distinction with the soft ⟨c, g⟩ representing [tʃ, j~dʒ].) This has the effect of keeping the modern spelling similar to the original Latin spelling, but complicates the relationship between sound and letter. In particular, the hard sounds must be written differently before ⟨e, i, y⟩ (e.g. Italian ⟨ch, gh⟩, Portuguese ⟨qu, gu⟩), and likewise for the soft sounds when not before these letters (e.g. Italian ⟨ci, gi⟩, Portuguese ⟨ç, j⟩). Furthermore, in Spanish, Catalan, Occitan and Brazilian Portuguese, the use of digraphs containing ⟨u⟩ to signal the hard pronunciation before ⟨e, i, y⟩ means that a different spelling is also needed to signal the sounds /kw, ɡw/ before these vowels (Spanish ⟨cu, gü⟩, Catalan, Occitan and Brazilian Portuguese ⟨qü, gü⟩).[51] This produces a number of orthographic alternations in verbs whose pronunciation is entirely regular. The following are examples of corresponding first-person plural indicative and subjunctive in a number of regular Portuguese verbs: marcamos, marquemos "we mark"; caçamos, cacemos "we hunt"; chegamos, cheguemos "we arrive"; averiguamos, averigüemos "we verify"; adequamos, adeqüemos "we adapt"; oferecemos, ofereçamos "we offer"; dirigimos, dirijamos "we drive" erguemos, ergamos "we raise"; delinquimos, delincamos "we commit a crime". In the case of Italian, the convention of digraphs <ch> and <gh> to represent /k/ and /g/ before written <e, i> results in similar orthographic alternations, such as dimentico 'I forget', dimentichi 'you forget', baco 'worm', bachi 'worms' with [k] or pago 'I pay', paghi 'you pay' and lago 'lake', laghi 'lakes' with [g]. The use in Italian of <ci> and <gi> to represent /tʃ/ or /dʒ/ before vowels written <a,o,u> neatly distinguishes dico 'I say' with /k/ from dici 'you say' with /tʃ/ or ghiro 'dormouse' /g/ and giro 'turn, revolution' /dʒ/, but with orthographic <ci> and <gi> also representing the sequence of /tʃ/ or /dʒ/ and the actual vowel /i/ (/ditʃi/ dici, /dʒiro/ giro), and no generally observed convention of indicating stress position, the status of i when followed by another vowel in spelling can be unrecognizable. For example, the written forms offer no indication that <cia> in camicia 'shirt' represents a single unstressed syllable /tʃa/ with no /i/ at any level (/kaˈmitʃa/ → [kaˈmiːtʃa] ~ [kaˈmiːʃa]), but that underlying the same spelling <cia> in farmacia 'pharmacy' is a bisyllabic sequence of /tʃ/ and stressed /i/ (/farmaˈtʃia/ → [farmaˈtʃiːa] ~ [farmaˈʃiːa]).

Lenition

Stop consonants shifted by lenition in Vulgar Latin.

The voiced labial consonants /b/ and /w/ (represented by ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩, respectively) both developed a fricative [β] as an intervocalic allophone.[52] This is clear from the orthography; in medieval times, the spelling of a consonantal ⟨v⟩ is often used for what had been a ⟨b⟩ in Classical Latin, or the two spellings were used interchangeably. In many Romance languages (Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.), this fricative later developed into a /v/; but in others (Spanish, Galician, some Catalan and Occitan dialects, etc.) reflexes of /b/ and /w/ simply merged into a single phoneme.

Several other consonants were "softened" in intervocalic position in Western Romance (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Northern Italian), but normally not phonemically in the rest of Italy (except some cases of "elegant" or Ecclesiastical words), nor apparently at all in Romanian. The dividing line between the two sets of dialects is called the La Spezia–Rimini Line and is one of the most important isoglosses of the Romance dialects. The changes (instances of diachronic lenition) are as follows:

Single voiceless plosives became voiced: -p-, -t-, -c- > -b-, -d-, -g-. Subsequently, in some languages they were further weakened, either becoming fricatives or approximants, [β̞], [ð̞], [ɣ˕] (as in Spanish) or disappearing entirely (as /t/ and /k/, but not /p/, in French). The following example shows progressive weakening of original /t/: e.g. vītam > Italian vita [ˈvita], Portuguese vida [ˈvidɐ] (European Portuguese [ˈviðɐ]), Spanish vida [ˈbiða] (Southern Peninsular Spanish [ˈbia]), and French vie [vi]. Some have speculated that these sound changes may be due in part to the influence of Continental Celtic languages.

Consonant length is no longer phonemically distinctive in most Romance languages. However some languages of Italy (Italian, Sardinian, Sicilian, and numerous other varieties of central and southern Italy) do have long consonants like /ɡɡ/, /dd/, /bb/, /kk/, /tt/, /pp/, /ll/, /mm/, /nn/, /ss/, /rr/, etc., where the doubling indicates either actual length or, in the case of plosives and affricates, a short hold before the consonant is released, in many cases with distinctive lexical value: e.g. note /ˈnɔ.te/ (notes) vs. notte /ˈnɔt.te/ (night), cade /ˈka.de/ (s/he, it falls) vs. cadde /ˈkad.de/ (s/he, it fell), caro /ˈka.ro/ (dear, expensive) vs. carro /ˈkar.ro/ (cart). They may even occur at the beginning of words in Romanesco, Neapolitan, Sicilian and other southern varieties, and are occasionally indicated in writing, e.g. Sicilian cchiù (more), and ccà (here). In general, the consonants /b/, /ts/, and /dz/ are long at the start of a word, while the archiphoneme |R| is realised as a trill /r/ in the same position. In much of central and southern Italy, the affricates /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/ weaken synchronically to fricative [ʃ] and [ʒ] between vowels, while their geminate congeners do not, e.g. cacio /ˈka.t͡ʃo/ → [ˈkaːʃo] (cheese) vs. caccio /ˈkat.t͡ʃo/ → [ˈkat.t͡ʃo] (I chase).

A few languages have regained secondary geminate consonants. The double consonants of Piedmontese exist only after stressed /ə/, written ë, and are not etymological: vëdde (Latin vidēre, to see), sëcca (Latin sicca, dry, feminine of sech). In standard Catalan and Occitan, there exists a geminate sound /lː/ written ŀl (Catalan) or ll (Occitan), but it is usually pronounced as a simple sound in colloquial (and even some formal) speech in both languages.

Prosthesis

In Western Romance, an epenthetic or prosthetic vowel was inserted at the beginning of any word that began with /s/ and another consonant: spatha "sword" > Spanish/Portuguese espada, Catalan espasa, Old French espeḍe > modern épée; Stephanum "Stephen" > Spanish Esteban, Catalan Esteve, Portuguese Estêvão, Old French Estievne > modern Étienne; status "state" > Spanish/Portuguese estado, Catalan estat, Old French estat > modern état; spiritus "spirit" > Spanish espíritu, Portuguese espírito, Catalan esperit, French esprit. Epenthetic /e/ in Western Romance languages was also probably influenced by Continental Celtic languages. While Western Romance words undergo word-initial epenthesis (prothesis), cognates in Italian do not: spatha > spada, Stephanum > Stefano, status > stato, spiritus > spirito. In Italian, syllabification rules were preserved instead by vowel-final articles, thus feminine spada as la spada, but instead of rendering the masculine *il spaghetto, lo spaghetto came to be the norm. Though receding at present, Italian once had an epenthetic /i/ if a consonant preceded such clusters, so that 'in Switzerland' was in [i]Svizzera. Some speakers still use the prothetic [i] productively, and it is fossilized in a few set phrases as per iscritto 'in writing' (although in this case its survival may be due partly to the influence of the separate word iscritto < Latin īnscrīptus).

Stressed vowels

Loss of vowel length, reorientation

Evolution of the stressed vowels in early Romance
Classical Proto-
Romance		 Western
Romance		 Balkan
Romance 		Sardinian Sicilian
Acad.1 Roman IPA Acad.1 IPA IPA
ī long i /iː/ /i/ [i(ː)] i /i/ /i/ /i/
ȳ long y /yː/
i (ĭ) short i /i/ [ɪ] /ɪ/ [ɪ(ː)] ẹ /e/
y (y̆) short y /y/
ē long e /eː/ /e/ [e(ː)] /e/
œ oe /oj/ > /eː/
e (ĕ) short e /e/ [ɛ] /ɛ/ [ɛ(ː)] ę /ɛ/ /ɛ/
æ ae /aj/ > [ɛː]
ā long a /aː/ /a/ [a(ː)] a /a/
a (ă) short a /a/
o (ŏ) short o /o/ [ɔ] /ɔ/ [ɔ(ː)] ǫ /ɔ/ /o/ /ɔ/
ō long o /oː/ /o/ [o(ː)] ọ /o/ /u/
au
(a few words)		 au /aw/ > /oː/
u (ŭ) short u /u/ [ʊ] /ʊ/ [ʊ(ː)] /u/
ū long u /uː/ /u/ [u(ː)] u /u/
au
(most words)		 au /aw/ au /aw/
1 Traditional academic transcription in Latin and Romance studies, respectively.

One profound change that affected Vulgar Latin was the reorganisation of its vowel system. Classical Latin had five short vowels, ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ, and five long vowels, ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, each of which was an individual phoneme (see the table in the right, for their likely pronunciation in IPA), and four diphthongs, ae, oe, au and eu (five according to some authors, including ui). There were also long and short versions of y, representing the rounded vowel /y(ː)/ in Greek borrowings, which however probably came to be pronounced /i(ː)/ even before Romance vowel changes started.

There is evidence that in the imperial period all the short vowels except a differed by quality as well as by length from their long counterparts.[53] So, for example ē was pronounced close-mid /eː/ while ĕ was pronounced open-mid /ɛ/, and ī was pronounced close /iː/ while ĭ was pronounced near-close /ɪ/.

During the Proto-Romance period, phonemic length distinctions were lost. Vowels came to be automatically pronounced long in stressed, open syllables (i.e. when followed by only one consonant), and pronounced short everywhere else. This situation is still maintained in modern Italian: cade [ˈkaːde] "he falls" vs. cadde [ˈkadde] "he fell".

The Proto-Romance loss of phonemic length originally produced a system with nine different quality distinctions in monophthongs, where only original /ă ā/ had merged. Soon, however, many of these vowels coalesced:

The Proto-Romance allophonic vowel-length system was rephonemicized in the Gallo-Romance languages as a result of the loss of many final vowels. Some northern Italian languages (e.g. Friulan) still maintain this secondary phonemic length, but most languages dropped it by either diphthongizing or shortening the new long vowels.

French phonemicized a third vowel length system around AD 1300 as a result of the sound change /VsC/ > /VhC/ > /VːC/ (where V is any vowel and C any consonant). This vowel length was eventually lost by around AD 1700, but the former long vowels are still marked with a circumflex. A fourth vowel length system, still non-phonemic, has now arisen: All nasal vowels as well as the oral vowels /ɑ o ø/ (which mostly derive from former long vowels) are pronounced long in all stressed closed syllables, and all vowels are pronounced long in syllables closed by the voiced fricatives /v z ʒ ʁ vʁ/. This system in turn has been phonemicized in some non-standard dialects (e.g. Haitian Creole), as a result of the loss of final /ʁ/.

Latin diphthongs

The Latin diphthongs ae and oe, pronounced /ai/ and /oi/ in earlier Latin, were early on monophthongized.

ae became /ɛː/ by the 1st century a.d. at the latest. Although this sound was still distinct from all existing vowels, the neutralization of Latin vowel length eventually caused its merger with /ɛ/ < short e: e.g. caelum "sky" > French ciel, Spanish/Italian cielo, Portuguese céu /sɛw/, with the same vowel as in mele "honey" > French/Spanish miel, Italian miele, Portuguese mel /mɛl/. Some words show an early merger of ae with /eː/, as in praeda "booty" > *prēda /preːda/ > French proie (vs. expected **priée), Italian preda (not **prieda) "prey"; or faenum "hay" > *fēnum [feːnũ] > Spanish heno, French foin (but Italian fieno /fjɛno/).

oe generally merged with /eː/: poenam "punishment" > Romance */pena/ > Spanish/Italian pena, French peine; foedus "ugly" > Romance */fedo/ > Spanish feo, Portuguese feio. There are relatively few such outcomes, since oe was rare in Classical Latin (most original instances had become Classical ū, as in Old Latin oinos "one" > Classical ūnus[55]) and so oe was mostly limited to Greek loanwords, which were typically learned (high-register) terms.

au merged with ō /oː/ in the popular speech of Rome already by the 1st century b.c. A number of authors remarked on this explicitly, e.g. Cicero's taunt that the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher had changed his name from Claudius to ingratiate himself with the masses. This change never penetrated far from Rome, however, and the pronunciation /au/ was maintained for centuries in the vast majority of Latin-speaking areas, although it eventually developed into some variety of o in many languages. For example, Italian and French have /ɔ/ as the usual reflex, but this post-dates diphthongization of /ɔ/ and the French-specific palatalization /ka/ > /tʃa/ (hence causa > French chose, Italian cosa /kɔza/ not **cuosa). Spanish has /o/, but Portuguese spelling maintains ⟨ou⟩, which has developed to /o/ (and still remains as /ou/ in some dialects, and /oi/ in others). Occitan, Romanian, southern Italian languages, and many other minority Romance languages still have /au/. A few common words, however, show an early merger with ō /oː/, evidently reflecting a generalization of the popular Roman pronunciation: e.g. French queue, Italian coda /koda/, Occitan co(d)a, Romanian coadă (all meaning "tail") must all derive from cōda rather than Classical cauda (but notice Portuguese cauda).[56] Similarly, Portuguese orelha, French oreille, Romanian ureche, and Sardinian olícra, orícla "ear" must derive from ōric(u)la rather than Classical auris (Occitan aurelha was probably influenced by the unrelated ausir < audīre "to hear"), and the form oricla is in fact reflected in the Appendix Probi.

Further developments

Metaphony

An early process that operated in all Romance languages to varying degrees was metaphony (vowel mutation), conceptually similar to the umlaut process so characteristic of the Germanic languages. Depending on the language, certain stressed vowels were raised (or sometimes diphthongized) either by a final /i/ or /u/ or by a directly following /j/. Metaphony is most extensive in the Italo-Romance languages, and applies to nearly all languages in Italy; however, it is absent from Tuscan, and hence from standard Italian. In many languages affected by metaphony, a distinction exists between final /u/ (from most cases of Latin -um) and final /o/ (from Latin -ō, -ud and some cases of -um, esp. masculine "mass" nouns), and only the former triggers metaphony.

Some examples:

Diphthongization

A number of languages diphthongized some of the free vowels, especially the open-mid vowels /ɛ ɔ/:

These diphthongizations had the effect of reducing or eliminating the distinctions between open-mid and close-mid vowels in many languages. In Spanish and Romanian, all open-mid vowels were diphthongized, and the distinction disappeared entirely. Portuguese is the most conservative in this respect, keeping the seven-vowel system more or less unchanged (but with changes in particular circumstances, e.g. due to metaphony). Other than before palatalized consonants, Catalan keeps /ɔ o/ intact, but /ɛ e/ split in a complex fashion into /ɛ e ə/ and then coalesced again in the standard dialect (Eastern Catalan) in such a way that most original /ɛ e/ have reversed their quality to become /e ɛ/.

In French and Italian, the distinction between open-mid and close-mid vowels occurred only in closed syllables. Standard Italian more or less maintains this. In French, /e/ and /ɛ/ merged by the twelfth century or so, and the distinction between /ɔ/ and /o/ was eliminated without merging by the sound changes /u/ > /y/, /o/ > /u/. Generally this led to a situation where both [e,o] and [ɛ,ɔ] occur allophonically, with the close-mid vowels in open syllables and the open-mid vowels in closed syllables. This is still the situation in modern Spanish, for example. In French, however, both [e/ɛ] and [o/ɔ] were partly rephonemicized: Both /e/ and /ɛ/ occur in open syllables as a result of /aj/ > /ɛ/, and both /o/ and /ɔ/ occur in closed syllables as a result of /al/ > /au/ > /o/.

Old French also had numerous falling diphthongs resulting from diphthongization before palatal consonants or from a fronted /j/ originally following palatal consonants in Proto-Romance or later: e.g. pācem /patsʲe/ "peace" > PWR */padzʲe/ (lenition) > OF paiz /pajts/; *punctum "point" > Gallo-Romance */ponʲto/ > */pojɲto/ (fronting) > OF point /põjnt/. During the Old French period, preconsonantal /l/ [ɫ] vocalized to /w/, producing many new falling diphthongs: e.g. dulcem "sweet" > PWR */doltsʲe/ > OF dolz /duɫts/ > douz /duts/; fallet "fails, is deficient" > OF falt > faut "is needed"; bellus "beautiful" > OF bels [bɛɫs] > beaus [bɛaws]. By the end of the Middle French period, all falling diphthongs either monophthongized or switched to rising diphthongs: proto-OF /aj ɛj jɛj ej jej wɔj oj uj al ɛl el il ɔl ol ul/ > early OF /aj ɛj i ej yj oj yj aw ɛaw ew i ɔw ow y/ > modern spelling ⟨ai ei i oi ui oi ui au eau eu i ou ou u⟩ > mod. French /ɛ ɛ i wa ɥi wa ɥi o o ø i u u y/.

Nasalization

In both French and Portuguese, nasal vowels eventually developed from sequences of a vowel followed by a nasal consonant (/m/ or /n/). Originally, all vowels in both languages were nasalized before any nasal consonants, and nasal consonants not immediately followed by a vowel were eventually dropped. In French, nasal vowels before remaining nasal consonants were subsequently denasalized, but not before causing the vowels to lower somewhat, e.g. dōnat "he gives" > OF dune /dunə/ > donne /dɔn/, fēminam > femme /fam/. Other vowels remained diphthongized, and were dramatically lowered: fīnem "end" > fin /fɛ̃/ (often pronounced [fæ̃]); linguam "tongue" > langue /lɑ̃ɡ/; ūnum "one" > un /œ̃/, /ɛ̃/.

In Portuguese, /n/ between vowels was dropped, and the resulting hiatus eliminated through vowel contraction of various sorts, often producing diphthongs: manum, *manōs > PWR *manu, ˈmanos "hand(s)" > mão, mãos /mɐ̃w̃, mɐ̃w̃s/; canem, canēs "dog(s)" > PWR *kane, ˈkanes > *can, ˈcanes > cão, cães /kɐ̃w̃, kɐ̃j̃s/; ratiōnem, ratiōnēs "reason(s)" > PWR *raˈdʲzʲone, raˈdʲzʲones > *raˈdzon, raˈdzones > razão, razões /χaˈzɐ̃w̃, χaˈzõj̃s/ (Brazil), /ʁaˈzɐ̃ũ, ʁɐˈzõj̃ʃ/ (Portugal). Sometimes the nasalization was eliminated: lūna "moon" > Galician-Portuguese lũa > lua; vēna "vein" > Galician-Portuguese vẽa > veia. Nasal vowels that remained actually tend to be raised (rather than lowered, as in French): fīnem "end" > fim /fĩ/; centum "hundred" > PWR tʲsʲɛnto > cento /ˈsẽtu/; pontem "bridge" > PWR pɔnte > ponte /ˈpõtʃi/ (Brazil), /ˈpõtɨ/ (Portugal). In Portugal, vowels before a nasal consonant have become denasalized, but in Brazil they remain heavily nasalized.

Front-rounded vowels

Characteristic of the Gallo-Romance languages and Rhaeto-Romance languages are the front rounded vowels /y ø œ/. All of these languages show an unconditional change /u/ > /y/, e.g. lūnam > French lune /lyn/, Occitan /ˈlyno/. Many of the languages in Switzerland and Italy show the further change /y/ > /i/. Also very common is some variation of the French development /ɔː oː/ (lengthened in open syllables) > /we ew/ > /œ œ/, with mid back vowels diphthongizing in some circumstances and then re-monophthongizing into mid-front rounded vowels. (French has both /ø/ and /œ/, with /ø/ developing from /œ/ in certain circumstances.)

Unstressed vowels

Evolution of unstressed vowels in early Italo-Western Romance
Latin Proto-
Romance		 Stressed Non-final
unstressed 		Final-unstressed
Original Later
Italo-
Romance		 Later
Western-
Romance		 Gallo-
Romance		 Primitive
French
IPA Acad.1 IPA
a,ā /a/ a /a/ /a/ /ə/
e,ae /ɛ/ ę /ɛ/ /e/ /e/ /e/ ∅; /e/ (prop) ∅; /ə/ (prop)
ē,oe /e/ ẹ /e/
i,y /ɪ/
ī,ȳ /i/ i /i/ /i/
o /ɔ/ ǫ /ɔ/ /o/ /o/ /o/
ō,(au) /o/ ọ /o/
u /ʊ/ /u/
ū /u/ u /u/
au
(most words)		 /aw/ au /aw/ N/A
1 Traditional academic transcription in Romance studies.

There was more variability in the result of the unstressed vowels. Originally in Proto-Romance, the same nine vowels developed in unstressed as stressed syllables, and in Sardinian, they coalesced into the same five vowels in the same way.

In Italo-Western Romance, however, vowels in unstressed syllables were significantly different from stressed vowels, with yet a third outcome for final unstressed syllables. In non-final unstressed syllables, the seven-vowel system of stressed syllables developed, but then the low-mid vowels /ɛ ɔ/ merged into the high-mid vowels /e o/. This system is still preserved, largely or completely, in all of the conservative Romance languages (e.g. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan).

In final unstressed syllables, results were somewhat complex. One of the more difficult issues is the development of final short -u, which appears to have been raised to /u/ rather than lowered to /o/, as happened in all other syllables. However, it is possible that in reality, final /u/ comes from long *-ū < -um, where original final -m caused vowel lengthening as well as nasalization. Evidence of this comes from Rhaeto-Romance, in particular Sursilvan, which preserves reflexes of both final -us and -um, and where the latter, but not the former, triggers metaphony. This suggests the development -us > /ʊs/ > /os/, but -um > /ũː/ > /u/.[62]

Examples of evolution of final unstressed vowels:
From least- to most-changed languages
English Latin Proto-Italo-Western1 Conservative
Central Italian1 		Italian Spanish Catalan Old French
a, e, i, o, u a, e, i, o, u a, e, i, o a, e/-, o a, -/e e, -/e
one (fem.) ūnam ˈuna una una una una une
door portam ˈpɔrta pɔrta porta puerta porta porte
seven septem ˈsɛtte sɛtte sette siete set set
sea mare ˈmare mare mare mar mar mer
peace pācem ˈpatʃe pace pace paz pau paiz
part partem ˈparte parte parte parte part part
mother mātrem ˈmatre matre madre madre mare meḍre
twenty vīgintī veˈenti vinti venti veinte vint vint
four quattuor ˈkwattro quattro quattro cuatro quatre quatre
eight octō ˈɔkto ɔtto otto ocho vuit huit
when quandō ˈkwando quando quando cuando quan quant
fourth quartum ˈkwartu quartu quarto cuarto quart quart
one (masc.) ūnum ˈunu unu uno uno un un
port portum ˈpɔrtu portu porto puerto port port
1 These columns use IPA symbols /ɔ, ɛ/ to indicate open-mid vowels.

The original five-vowel system in final unstressed syllables was preserved as-is in some of the more conservative central Italian languages, but in most languages there was further coalescence:

Various later changes happened in individual languages, e.g.:

Intertonic vowels

The so-called intertonic vowels are word-internal unstressed vowels, i.e. not in the initial, final, or tonic (i.e. stressed) syllable, hence intertonic. Intertonic vowels were the most subject to loss or modification. Already in Vulgar Latin intertonic vowels between a single consonant and a following /r/ or /l/ tended to drop: vétulum "old" > veclum > Dalmatian vieklo, Sicilian vecchiu, Portuguese velho. But many languages ultimately dropped almost all intertonic vowels.

Generally, those languages south and east of the La Spezia–Rimini Line (Romanian and Central-Southern Italian) maintained intertonic vowels, while those to the north and west (Western Romance) dropped all except /a/. Standard Italian generally maintained intertonic vowels, but typically raised unstressed /e/ > /i/. Examples:

Portuguese is more conservative in maintaining some intertonic vowels other than /a/: e.g. *offerḗscere "to offer" > Portuguese oferecer vs. Spanish ofrecer, French offrir (< *offerīre). French, on the other hand, drops even intertonic /a/ after the stress: Stéphanum "Stephen" > Spanish Esteban but Old French Estievne > French Étienne. Many cases of /a/ before the stress also ultimately dropped in French: sacraméntum "sacrament" > Old French sairement > French serment "oath".

Writing systems

The Romance languages for the most part have kept the writing system of Latin, adapting it to their evolution. One exception was Romanian before the nineteenth century, where, after the Roman retreat, literacy was reintroduced through the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, a Slavic influence. A Cyrillic alphabet was also used for Romanian (Moldovan) in the USSR. The non-Christian populations of Spain also used the scripts of their religions (Arabic and Hebrew) to write Romance languages such as Ladino and Mozarabic in aljamiado.

Letters

Spelling of results of palatalization and related sounds
Sound Spanish Portuguese French Italian Romanian
/k/, not + ⟨e, i, y⟩ ⟨c⟩
palatalized /k/ (/tʃ/~/s/~/θ/), + ⟨e, i, y⟩ ⟨c⟩
palatalized /k/ (/tʃ/~/s/~/θ/), not + ⟨e, i, y⟩ ⟨z⟩ ⟨ç⟩ ⟨ci⟩
/kw/, not + ⟨e, i, y⟩ ⟨cu⟩ ⟨qu⟩ —
/k/ + ⟨e, i⟩ (inherited) ⟨qu⟩ ⟨ch⟩
/kw/ + ⟨e, i⟩ (learned) ⟨cu⟩ ⟨qu⟩[66] —
/g/, not + ⟨e, i, y⟩ ⟨g⟩
palatalized /k, g/
(/dʒ/~/ʒ/~/x/), + ⟨e, i, y⟩ 		⟨g⟩
palatalized /k, g/
(/dʒ/~/ʒ/~/x/), not + ⟨e, i, y⟩ 		⟨j⟩ ⟨g(e)⟩ ⟨gi⟩
/gw/, not + ⟨e ,i⟩ ⟨gu⟩
/g/ + ⟨e, i⟩ (inherited) ⟨gu⟩ ⟨gh⟩
/gw/ + ⟨e, i⟩ (learned) ⟨gü⟩ ⟨gu⟩[67]
(former) /ʎ/ ⟨ll⟩ ⟨lh⟩ ⟨il(l)⟩ ⟨gli⟩ —
/ɲ/ ⟨ñ⟩ ⟨nh⟩ ⟨gn⟩ —

The Romance languages are written with the classical Latin alphabet of 23 letters – A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Y, Z – subsequently modified and augmented in various ways. In particular, the single Latin letter V split into V (consonant) and U (vowel), and the letter I split into I and J. The Latin letter K and the new letter W, which came to be widely used in Germanic languages, are seldom used in most Romance languages – mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words. Indeed, in Italian prose kilometro is properly chilometro. Catalan eschews importation of "foreign" letters more than most languages. Thus Wikipedia is Viquipèdia in Catalan but Wikipedia in Spanish.

While most of the 23 basic Latin letters have maintained their phonetic value, for some of them it has 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 that could not be recorded with the basic Latin alphabet, or to get around previously established spelling conventions. Most languages added auxiliary marks (diacritics) to some letters, for these and other purposes.

The spelling rules of most Romance languages are fairly simple, and consistent within any language. Since the spelling systems are based on phonemic structures rather than phonetics, however, the actual pronunciation of what is represented in standard orthography can be subject to considerable regional variation, as well as to allophonic differentiation by position in the word or utterance. Among the letters representing the most conspicuous phonological variations, between Romance languages or with respect to Latin, are the following:

B, V: Merged in Spanish and most dialects of Catalan, where both letters represent a single phoneme pronounced as either [b] or [β] depending on position, with no differentiation between B and V.
C: Generally a "hard" [k], but "soft" (fricative or affricate) before e, i, or y.
G: Generally a "hard" [ɡ], but "soft" (fricative or affricate) before e, i, or y. In some languages, like Spanish, the hard g, phonemically /g/, is pronounced as a fricative [ɣ] after vowels. In Romansch, the soft g is a voiced palatal plosive [ɟ] or a voiced alveolo-palatal affricate [dʑ].
H: Silent in most languages; used to form various digraphs. But represents [h] in Romanian, Walloon and Gascon Occitan.
J: Represents the fricative [ʒ] in most languages, or the palatal approximant [j] in Romansh and in several of the languages of Italy. Italian does not use this letter in native words.
Q: As in Latin, its phonetic value is that of a hard c, i.e. [k], and in native words it is always followed by a (sometimes silent) u. Romanian does not use this letter in native words.
S: Generally voiceless [s], but voiced [z] between vowels in some languages. In Spanish, Romanian, Galician and several varieties of Italian, however, it is always pronounced voiceless between vowels. If the phoneme /s/ is represented by the letter S, predictable assimilations are normally not shown (e.g. Italian /slitta/ 'sled', spelled slitta but pronounced [zlitːa], never with [s]). Also at the end of syllables it may represent special allophonic pronunciations. In Romansh, it also stands for a voiceless or voiced fricative, [ʃ] or [ʒ], before certain consonants.
W: No Romance language uses this letter in native words, with the exception of Walloon.
X: Its pronunciation is rather variable, both between and within languages. In the Middle Ages, the languages of Iberia used this letter to denote the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ], which is still the case in Modern Catalan and Portuguese. With the Renaissance the classical pronunciation [ks] – or similar consonant clusters, such as [ɡz], [ɡs], or [kθ] – were frequently reintroduced in latinisms and hellenisms. In Venetian it represents [z], and in Ligurian the voiced postalveolar fricative [ʒ]. Italian does not use this letter in native words.
Y: This letter is not used in most languages, with the prominent exceptions of French and Spanish, where it represents [j] before vowels (or various similar fricatives such as the palatal fricative [ʝ], in Spanish), and the vowel [i] or semivowel [j] elsewhere.
Z: In most languages it represents the sound [z]. However, in Italian it denotes the affricates [dz] and [ts] (which are two separate phonemes, but rarely contrast; among the few examples of minimal pairs are razza "ray" with [ddz], razza "race" with [tts] (note that both are phonetically long between vowels); in Romansh the voiceless affricate [ts]; and in Galician and Spanish it denotes either the voiceless dental fricative [θ] or [s].

Otherwise, letters that are not combined as digraphs generally represent the same phonemes as suggested by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), whose design was, in fact, greatly influenced by Romance spelling systems.

Digraphs and trigraphs

Since most Romance languages have more sounds than can be accommodated in the Roman Latin alphabet they all resort to the use of digraphs and trigraphs – combinations of two or three letters with a single phonemic value. The concept (but not the actual combinations) is derived from Classical Latin, which used, for example, TH, PH, and CH when transliterating the Greek letters "θ", "ϕ" (later "φ"), and "χ". These were once aspirated sounds in Greek before changing to corresponding fricatives, and the H represented what sounded to the Romans like an /ʰ/ following /t/, /p/, and /k/ respectively. Some of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:

CI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican and Romanian to represent /tʃ/ before A, O, or U.
CH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican, Romanian, Romansh and Sardinian to represent /k/ before E or I (including yod /j/); /tʃ/ in Occitan, Spanish, Astur-leonese and Galician; [c] or [tɕ] in Romansh before A, O or U; and /ʃ/ in most other languages. In Catalan it is used in some old spelling conventions for /k/.
DD: used in Sicilian and Sardinian to represent the voiced retroflex plosive /ɖ/. In recent history more accurately transcribed as DDH.
DJ: used in Walloon and Catalan for /dʒ/.
GI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican and Romanian to represent /dʒ/ before A, O, or U, and in Romansh to represent [ɟi] or /dʑi/ or (before A, E, O, and U) [ɟ] or /dʑ/
GH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican, Romanian, Romansh and Sardinian to represent /ɡ/ before E or I (including yod /j/), and in Galician for the voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ħ/ (not standard sound).
GL: used in Romansh before consonants and I and at the end of words for /ʎ/.
GLI: used in Italian and Corsican for /ʎʎ/ and Romansh for /ʎ/.
GN: used in French, some Romance languages in Italy, Corsican and Romansh for /ɲ/, as in champignon; in Italian to represent /ɲɲ/, as in "ogni" or "lo gnocco".
GU: used before E or I to represent /ɡ/ or /ɣ/ in all Romance languages except Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican, Romansh, and Romanian, which use GH instead.
IG: used at the end of word in Catalan for /tʃ/, as in maig, safareig or enmig.
IX: used between vowels or at the end of word in Catalan for /ʃ/, as in caixa or calaix.
LH: used in Portuguese and Occitan /ʎ/.
LL: used in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Astur-leonese, Norman and Dgèrnésiais, originally for /ʎ/ which has merged in some cases with /j/. Represents /l/ in French unless it follows I (i) when it represents /j/ (or /ʎ/ in some dialects). As in Italian, it is used in Occitan for a long /ll/.
L·L: used in Catalan for a geminate consonant /ɫɫ/.
NH: used in Portuguese and Occitan for /ɲ/, used in official Galician for /ŋ/ .
N-: used in Piedmontese and Ligurian for /ŋ/ between two vowels.
NN: used in Leonese for /ɲ/, in Italian for geminate /nn/.
NY: used in Catalan for /ɲ/.
QU: represents /kw/ in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, and Romansh; /k/ in French, Astur-leonese (normally before e or i); /k/ (before e or i) or /kw/ (normally before a or o) in Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese; /k/ in Spanish (always before e or i).
RR: used between vowels in several languages (Occitan, Catalan, Spanish...) to denote a trilled /r/ or a guttural R, instead of the flap /ɾ/.
SC: used before E or I in Italian, Romance languages in Italy as /ʃʃ/, in European Portuguese as /ʃˈs/ and in French, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan and Latin American Spanish as /s/ in words of certain etymology (notice this would represent /θ/ in standard peninsular Spanish)
SCH: used in Romansh for [ʃ] or [ʒ], in Italian for /sk/ before "E"or "I", including yod /j/.
SCI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, and Corsican to represent /ʃ/ or /ʃʃ/ before A, O, or U.
SH: used in Aranese Occitan for /ʃ/.
SS: used in French, Portuguese, Piedmontese, Romansh, Occitan, and Catalan for /s/ between vowels, in Italian, Romance languages of Italy, and Corsican for long /ss/.
TS: used in Catalan for /ts/.
TG: used in Romansh for [c] or [tɕ]. In Catalan is used for /dʒ/ before E and I, as in metge or fetge.
TH: used in Jèrriais for /θ/; used in Aranese for either /t/ or /tʃ/.
TJ: used between vowels and before A, O or U, in Catalan for /dʒ/, as in sotjar or mitjó.
TSCH: used in Romansh for [tʃ].
TX: used at the beginning or at the end of word or between vowels in Catalan for /tʃ/, as in txec, esquitx or atxa.
TZ: used in Catalan for /dz/.

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 now represent /k/ or /ʃ/, /f/, /ʀ/ and /t/, respectively.

Double consonants

Gemination, in the languages where it occurs, is usually indicated by doubling the consonant, except when it does not contrast phonemically with the corresponding short consonant, in which case gemination is not indicated. In Jèrriais, long consonants are marked with an apostrophe: S'S is a long /zz/, SS'S is a long /ss/, and T'T is a long /tt/. Phonemic contrast of geminates vs. single consonants is widespread in Italian, and normally indicated in the traditional orthography: fatto /fatto/ 'done' vs. fato /fato/ 'fate, destiny'; cadde /kadde/ 's/he, it fell' vs. cade /kade/ 's/he, it falls'. The double consonants in French orthography, however, are merely etymological. In Catalan, the gemination of the l is marked by a punt volat = flying point – l·l.

Diacritics

Romance languages also introduced various marks (diacritics) that may be attached to some letters, for various purposes. In some cases, diacritics are used as an alternative to digraphs and trigraphs; namely to represent a larger number of sounds than would be possible with the basic alphabet, or to distinguish between sounds that were previously written the same. Diacritics are also used to mark word stress, to indicate exceptional pronunciation of letters in certain words, and to distinguish words with same pronunciation (homophones).

Depending on the language, some letter-diacritic combinations may be considered distinct letters, e.g. for the purposes of lexical sorting. This is the case, for example, of Romanian ș ([ʃ]) and Spanish ñ ([ɲ]).

The following are the most common use of diacritics in Romance languages.

Upper and lower case

Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "cases" of the alphabet: majuscule ("uppercase" or "capital letters"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and minuscule ("lowercase"), derived from Carolingian writing and Medieval quill pen handwriting which were later adapted by printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In particular, all Romance languages 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. 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 usually 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.

Vocabulary comparison

The tables below provide a vocabulary comparison that illustrates a number of examples of sound shifts that have occurred between Latin and Romance languages, along with a selection of minority languages. Words are given in their conventional spellings. In addition, for French the actual pronunciation is given, due to the dramatic differences between spelling and pronunciation. (French spelling approximately reflects the pronunciation of Old French, c. 1200 AD.)

English Latin Sardinian
(Nuorese)[68]		 Romanian Sicilian[69][70][71] Italian Venetian Emilian Lombard Piedmontese[72] Friulian[73] Romansh French Occitan[74] Catalan Aragonese[75] Spanish Asturian[76] Portuguese
man homō, hominem ómine om omu uomo om(en)o òm(en) om(en) òm om um homme
/ɔm/		 òme home om(br)e hombre home homem
woman, wife mulier, mulierem muzère muiere mugghieri moglie mojer mujér miee/fomna fomna muîr muglier OF moillier OOc mólher (nom.) /
molhér (obj.)		 muller muller mujer muyer mulher
son fīlium fìzu fiu figghiu figlio fiol fiōl fiö/bagaj fieul fi figl, fegl fils /fis/ filh fill fillo hijo fíu filho
water aquam àbba apă acqua acqua acua aqua acqua/agua/ova/eiva eva aghe aua eau /o/ aiga aigua aigua, augua agua agua água
fire focum fócu foc focu fuoco fogo foeugh fögh feu fûc fieu feu /fø/ fuòc foc fuego fuego fueu fogo
rain pluviam próida ploaie chiuvuta[77] pioggia pióva pioeuva piöa pieuva ploe plievgia pluie /plɥi/ pluèja pluja plebia lluvia lluvia chuva
land terram tèrra ţară terra terra tera tera tera tèra tiere terra/tiara terre /tɛʁ/ tèrra terra tierra tierra tierra terra
sky caelum chélu cer celu cielo çiél cēl cel/sel cel cîl tschiel ciel /sjɛl/ cèl cel zielo cielo cielu céu
high altum àrtu înalt autu alto alto élt volt/ot àut alt aut haut[78] /o/ n-aut alt alto alto altu alto
new novum nóbu nou novu nuovo nóvo noeuv nöf/noeuv neuv gnove nov neuf /nœf/ nòu nou nuebo nuevo nuevu novo
horse caballum càdhu cal cavaddu cavallo cavało cavàl cavâl/caàl caval ĉhaval chaval cheval
/ʃ(ǝ)val/		 caval cavall caballo caballo caballu cavalo
dog canem cane câine cani cane can can ca(n) can cjan chaun chien
/ʃjɛ̃/		 can ca can can can cão
do facere fàchere face(re) fari/fàciri fare far far fà fé fâ far faire /fɛʁ/ far/fàser fer fer hacer facer fazer
milk lactem làte lapte latti latte late latt lacc/lat làit lat latg lait /lɛ/ lach llet leit leche lleche leite
eye oculum > *oclum ócru ochi occhiu occhio ocio òć ögg/oeucc euj (Western Piedmontese), eugg (Eastern Piedmontese) voli egl œil /œj/ uèlh ull güello ojo güeyu olho
ear auriculam > *oriclam orícra ureche auricchia orecchio orécia uréć orèggia/ureja orija orele ureglia oreille
/ɔʁɛj/		 aurelha orella orella oreja oreya orelha
tongue/
language		 linguam límba limbǎ lingua lingua léngua léngua lengua lenga lenghe lingua langue /lɑ̃ɡ/ lenga llengua luenga lengua llingua língua
hand manum manu mână manu mano man man man man man maun main /mɛ̃/ man mà man mano mano mão [mɐ̃w̃]
skin pellem pèdhe piele peddi pelle pełe pèl pel pel piel pel peau /po/ pèl pell piel piel piel pele
I ego (d)ègo eu eu/jè/ju io (mi)[79] (mì/mè)[79] (mi/mé)[79] i(/mi)[79] jo jau je /ʒǝ/ ieu/jo jo yo yo yo eu
our nostrum nóstru nostru nostru nostro nostro noster nòst nòst nestri noss notre /nɔtʁ/ nòstre nostre nuestro nuestro nuesu,[80] nuestru nosso[80]
three trēs tres trei tri tre tre trii trii (m)/
tre (f)		 trè tre trais trois /tʁwa/ tres tres tres tres trés três
four quattuor >
*quattro		 bàttor patru quattru quattro cuatro quàtar quater quatr cuatri quat(t)er quatre /katʁ/ quatre quatre cuatre, cuatro cuatro cuatro quatro
five quīnque >
*cīnque		 chímbe cinci cincu cinque çincue sinc cinch/si(n)ch sinch cinc tschintg cinq /sɛ̃k/ cinc cinc zinco, zingo cinco cinco, cincu cinco
six sex ses şase sia sei sìe siē ses ses sîs sis six /sis/ sièis sis seis/sais seis seis seis
seven septem sète şapte setti sette sete sèt set set siet se(a)t, siat sept /sɛt/ sèt set siet(e) siete siete sete
eight octō òto opt ottu otto oto òt vot eut vot ot(g), och huit /ɥit/ uèch vuit güeito, ueito ocho ocho oito
nine novem nòbe nouă novi nove nove nóv nöf neuv nûv no(u)v neuf /nœf/ nòu nou nueu nueve nueve nove
ten decem dèche zece deci dieci diéxe déś des/dis des dîs diesch dix /dis/ dètz deu diez diez diez dez
English Latin Sardinian Romanian Sicilian Italian Venetian Emilian Lombard Piedmontese Friulian Romansh French Occitan Catalan Aragonese Spanish Asturian Portuguese

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Romance". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  2. ↑ [M. Paul Lewis, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth Edition http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size]
  3. ↑ Nationalencyklopedin "Världens 100 största språk 2007" The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007/2010
  4. ↑ David Dalby, 1999/2000, The Linguasphere register of the world’s languages and speech communities. Observatoire Linguistique, Linguasphere Press. Volume 2, p. 390-410 (zone 51). Oxford.
  5. ↑ Ilari, Rodolfo (2002). Lingüística Românica. Ática. p. 50. ISBN 85-08-04250-7.
  6. ↑ From the French substantive clos 'closed', itself from Latin clausus in T. F. Hoad, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English language, 1993, ISBN 0-19-283098-8, p. 80b.
  7. ↑ From French verb diner, itself from Late Latin disjūnāre 'break one 's fast' in HOAD, p. 125b.
  8. ↑ Rochette, p. 550
  9. ↑ Stefan Zimmer, "Indo-European," in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio, 2006), p. 961
  10. ↑ Curchin, Leonard A. (1995). "Literacy in the Roman Provinces: Qualitative and Quantitative Data from Central Spain". The American Journal of Philology. 116 (3): 461–476 (464). JSTOR 295333. doi:10.2307/295333.
  11. ↑ Herman, Jozsef (1 November 2010). Vulgar Latin. Penn State Press. ISBN 0-271-04177-3., pp. 108–115
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 Price, Glanville (1984). The French language: past and present. London: Grant and Cutler Ltd.
  13. ↑ "Na" is a contraction of "em" (in) + "a" (the), the form "em a" is never used, it is always replaced by "na". The same happens with other prepositions: "de" (of) + o/a/os/as (singular and plural forms for "the" in masculine and feminine) = do, da, dos, das; etc.
  14. ↑ Verb; literally means "to put in mouth"
  15. ↑ See Portuguese in Africa.
  16. ↑ See Portuguese in Asia and Oceania.
  17. ↑ See List of countries where Portuguese is an official language.
  18. ↑ 1993 Statistical Abstract of Israel reports 250,000 speakers of Romanian in Israel, while the 1995 census puts the total figure of the Israeli population at 5,548,523
  19. ↑ "Reports of about 300,000 Jews who left the country after WW2". Eurojewcong.org. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
  20. ↑ "Encarta Dictionary". Microsoft Encarta 2006. Retrieved 2009-11-16.
  21. ↑ "Ethnologue". SIL Haley.
  22. ↑ "Romance languages". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2 December 2014.
  23. ↑ "Sardos etiam, qui non Latii sunt sed Latiis associandi videntur, eiciamus, quoniam soli sine proprio vulgari esse videntur, gramaticam tanquam simie homines imitantes: nam domus nova et dominus meus locuntur." ("Let us ignore the Sardinians, then, who are not Latins but appear to be associated with them, because they alone seem to lack their own common tongue, rather imitating (Latin) grammar as monkeys do men: For they say 'domus nova' and 'dominus meus'.") It is unclear whether this indic.tes that Sardinian still had a two-case system at the time; modern Sardinian lacks grammatical case.
  24. ↑ "NEO-ROMANTICISM IN LANGUAGE PLANNING (Edo BERNASCONI)".
  25. ↑ "NEO-ROMANTICISM IN LANGUAGE PLANNING (Edo BERNASCONI)".
  26. ↑ Peano, Giuseppe (1903). De Latino Sine Flexione. Lingua Auxiliare Internationale , Revista de Mathematica (Revue de Mathématiques), Tomo VIII, pp. 74–83. Fratres Bocca Editores: Torino.
  27. ↑ "Eall fhoil de Bhreathanach". Archived from the original on June 10, 2008.
  28. ↑ Henrik Theiling (2007-10-28). "Þrjótrunn: A North Romance Language: History". Kunstsprachen.de. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
  29. ↑ "Relay 10/R – Jelbazech". Steen.free.fr. 2004-08-28. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
  30. ↑ /ə/ can occur only in unstressed syllables, and it tends to be rounded [ɵ̞]; it is replaced by [ø] when stressed.
  31. ↑ /ɐ/ developed as the allophone of /a/ before nasals and under low stress, and the two are still nearly in complementary distribution. A few minimal pairs like falamos /fɐˈlɐmuʃ/ "we speak" vs. falámos /fɐˈlamuʃ/ "we spoke" seem to clearly indicate that /ɐ/ must be a phoneme, but other analyses are possible. /ɨ/, which developed from earlier /e/ in unstressed syllables, is even more doubtful.
  32. ↑ Haase, Martin. 2000. Reorganization of a gender system: The Central Italian neuters. in Gender in Grammar and Cognition, ed. by Barbara Unterbeck et al., pp. 221-236. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter
  33. 1 2 3 4 Harris, Martin; Vincent, Nigel (1988). The Romance Languages. London: Routledge.
  34. ↑ Kibler, William W. (1984). An introduction to Old French. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
  35. ↑ Henri Wittmann. ""Le français de Paris dans le français des Amériques."" (PDF). (52.1 KB), Proceedings of the International Congress of Linguists 16.0416 (Paris, 20–25 juillet 1997). Oxford: Pergamon (CD edition).
  36. ↑ ipse originally meant "self", as in ego ipse or egomet ipse "I myself". ipse later shifted to mean "the" (still reflected in Sardinian and in the Catalan spoken in the Balearic Islands), and still later came to be a demonstrative pronoun. From -met ipse the emphatic (superlative) form metipsimum was created, later evolving into medisimum and eventually Spanish mismo, French même, Italian medesimo, which replaced both Latin ipse "self" and idem "same". The alternative form metipse eventually produced Catalan mateix, Galician-Portuguese medês. The more frequent Italian equivalent, however, is stesso, derived from the combination istum-ipsum.
  37. 1 2 Accademia della Crusca On the use of the passato remoto (in Italian) Archived June 7, 2006, at the Wayback Machine.
  38. ↑ Cf. auret "she had" < Latin habuerat, voldrent "they wanted" < Latin voluerant. Not clearly distinct in meaning from the first (normal) preterite, cf. the parallel lines por o fut presentede "for this reason she was presented" (fut = first preterite, from Latin fuit) vs. por o's furet morte "for these reasons she was killed" (furet = second preterite, from Latin fuerat) in the same poem.
  39. ↑ Paden, William D. 1998. An Introduction to Old Occitan. Modern Language Association of America. ISBN 0-87352-293-1. (NEED PAGE NUMBER)
  40. ↑ σπάθη. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project.
  41. ↑ Harper, Douglas. "spatha". Online Etymology Dictionary.
  42. ↑ κάρα in Liddell and Scott.
  43. ↑ κόλαφος in Liddell and Scott.
  44. ↑ Harper, Douglas. "coup". Online Etymology Dictionary.
  45. ↑ κατά in Liddell and Scott.
  46. ↑ Harper, Douglas. "-ize". Online Etymology Dictionary..
  47. ↑ Harper, Douglas. "-ist". Online Etymology Dictionary.
  48. ↑ Wolf Dietrich, “Griechisch und Romanisch”, Lexikon der romanistischen Linguistik, vol 7: Kontakt, Migration und Kunstsprachen: Kontrastivität, Klassifikation und Typologie, eds. Günter Holtus, Michael Metzeltin & Christian Schmitt (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1998), 121-34:123-4.
  49. ↑ Originally formal, now equalizing or informal.
  50. ↑ Likewise Spanish usted < vuestra merced, Catalan vostè < vostra mercè.
  51. ↑ Note that the current Portuguese spelling (Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990) abolished the use of the diaeresis for this purpose.
  52. ↑ Pope (1934).
  53. ↑ Allen (2003) states: "There appears to have been no great difference in quality between long and short a, but in the case of the close and mid vowels (i and u, e and o) the long appear to have been appreciably closer than the short." He then goes on to the historical development, quotations from various authors (from around the second century AD), as well as evidence from older inscriptions where "e" stands for normally short i, and "i" for long e, etc.
  54. ↑ Technically, Sardinian is one of the Southern Romance languages. The same vowel outcome occurred in a small strip running across southern Italy (the Lausberg Zone), and is thought to have occurred in the Romance languages of northern Africa.
  55. ↑ Palmer (1954).
  56. ↑ cauda would produce French **choue, Italian */kɔda/, Occitan **cauda, Romanian **caudă.
  57. ↑ Kaze, Jeffery W. (1991). "Metaphony and Two Models for the Description of Vowel Systems". Phonology. 8 (1): 163–170. JSTOR 4420029. doi:10.1017/s0952675700001329.
  58. ↑ Calabrese, Andrea. "Metaphony" (PDF). Retrieved 2012-05-15.
  59. ↑ Álvaro Arias. El morfema de ‘neutro de materia’ en asturiano. Santiago de Compostela, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1999, I Premio «Dámaso Alonso» de Investigación Filológica.
  60. 1 2 Penny, Ralph (1994). "Continuity and Innovation in Romance: Metaphony and Mass-Noun Reference in Spain and Italy". The Modern Language Review. 89 (2): 273–281. JSTOR 3735232.
  61. ↑ Álvaro Arias. «La armonización vocálica en fonología funcional (de lo sintagmático en fonología a propósito de dos casos de metafonía hispánica)», Moenia 11 (2006): 111–139.
  62. ↑ Note that the outcome of -am -em -om would be the same regardless of whether lengthening occurred, and that -im was already rare in Classical Latin, and appears to have barely survived in Proto-Romance. The only likely survival is in "-teen" numerals such as trēdecim "thirteen" > Italian tredici. This favors the vowel-lengthening hypothesis -im > /ĩː/ > /i/; but notice unexpected decem > Italian dieci (rather than expected *diece). It is possible that dieci comes from *decim, which analogically replaced decem based on the -decim ending; but it is also possible that the final /i/ in dieci represents an irregular development of some other sort and that the process of analogy worked in the other direction.
  63. ↑ The Latin forms are attested; metipsissimus is the superlative of the formative -metipse, found for example in egometipse "myself in person"
  64. ↑ Ralph Penny, A History of the Spanish Language, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 144.
  65. ↑ Aurelio M. Espinosa, "Metipsimus in Spanish and French", PMLA, vol. 26, no. 2 (1911): 356–378.
  66. ↑ Formerly ⟨qü⟩ in Brazilian Portuguese
  67. ↑ Formerly ⟨gü⟩ in Brazilian Portuguese
  68. ↑ "Ditzionàriu Online". Retrieved 2013-09-14.
  69. ↑ "Sicilian–English Dictionary". Italian.about.com. 2010-06-15. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
  70. ↑ "Dictionary Sicilian – Italian". Utenti.lycos.it. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
  71. ↑ "Indo-European Languages". Retrieved 2013-09-18.
  72. ↑ "Grand Dissionari Piemontèis / Grande Dizionario Piemontese". Retrieved 2013-09-17.
  73. ↑ "Dictionary English–Friulian Friulian–English". Sangiorgioinsieme.it. Retrieved 2011-07-31.
  74. ↑ Beaumont (2008-12-16). "Occitan–English Dictionary". Freelang.net. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
  75. ↑ "English Aragonese Dictionary Online". Glosbe. Retrieved 2013-09-18.
  76. ↑ "English Asturian Dictionary Online". Glosbe. Retrieved 2013-09-18.
  77. ↑ Developed from *pluviūtam.
  78. ↑ Initial h- due to contamination of Germanic *hauh "high". Although no longer pronounced, it reveals its former presence by inhibiting elision of a preceding schwa, e.g. le haut "the high" vs. l'eau "the water".
  79. 1 2 3 4 Cognate with Latin mē, not ego. Note that this parallels the state of affairs in Celtic, where the cognate of ego is not attested anywhere, and the use of the accusative form cognate to mē has been extended to cover the nominative, as well.
  80. 1 2 Developed from an assimilated form *nossum rather than from nostrum.

References

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