{"history":[],"article":{"id":"5986dd24-e549-441f-b26d-6a014c3d8298","title":"Romance languages","slug":"romance-languages","content":":::summary\n**Name:** Romance \n**Altname:** Latin/Neo-Latin \n**Region:** Originated in [Old Latium](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-latium) on the [Italian peninsula](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-peninsula), now spoken in [Latin Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/languages-of-europe) (parts of [Eastern Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/eastern-europe), [Southern Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/southern-europe), and [Western Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-europe)) and [Latin America](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-america) (a majority of the countries of [Central America](https://bliptext.com/articles/central-america) and [South America](https://bliptext.com/articles/south-america)), as well as parts of [Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/africa) (Latin [Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/africa)), [Asia](https://bliptext.com/articles/asia), and [Oceania](https://bliptext.com/articles/oceania). \n**Familycolor:** Indo-European \n**Fam 2:** [Italic](https://bliptext.com/articles/italic-languages) \n**Fam 3:** [Latino-Faliscan](https://bliptext.com/articles/latino-faliscan-languages) \n**Fam 4:** [Latinic](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin) \n**Ancestor:** [Old Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-latin) \n**Ancestor 2:** [Vulgar Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vulgar-latin) \n**Protoname:** [Proto-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/proto-romance-language) \n**Child 1:** [Italo-Western](https://bliptext.com/articles/italo-western-languages) \n**Child 2:** [Eastern Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/eastern-romance-languages) \n**Child 3:** [Southern Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/southern-romance-languages) \n**Child 4:** [Pannonian](https://bliptext.com/articles/pannonian-latin) † \n**Child 5:** [British](https://bliptext.com/articles/british-latin) † \n**Iso 2:** roa \n**Iso 5:** roa \n**Glotto:** roma1334 \n**Glottorefname:** Romance \n**Lingua:** 51- (phylozone) \n**Map:** Romance languages.png \n**Mapcaption:** Romance languages in Europe \n**Map 2:** Detailed SVG map of the Romance-speaking world.svg \n**Mapcaption 2:** Romance languages globally · {{legend|#045a8d|Majority native language}} · {{legend|#0674b6|Co-official and majority native language}} · {{legend|#439dd4|Official but minority native language}} · {{legend|#9bbae1|Cultural or secondary language}} \n:::\n\n# \nThe **Romance [languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/language)**, also known as the **Latin** or Neo-**Latin** [languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/language), are the [languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/language) that are [directly descended](https://bliptext.com/articles/language-family) from Vulgar **Latin**.\nThey are the only extant subgroup of the [Italic branch](https://bliptext.com/articles/italic-languages) of the [Indo-European language family](https://bliptext.com/articles/indo-european-languages).\nThe five [most widely spoken Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/list-of-languages-by-number-of-native-speakers) by number of native speakers are:\nThe Romance languages spread throughout the world owing to the period of [European colonialism](https://bliptext.com/articles/european-colonialism) beginning in the 15th century; there are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the [Americas](https://bliptext.com/articles/americas), [Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/europe), and parts of [Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/africa).\nPortuguese, French and Spanish also have many non-native speakers and are in widespread use as [lingua francas](https://bliptext.com/articles/lingua-franca).\nThere are also numerous [regional](https://bliptext.com/articles/regional-languages) Romance languages and dialects.\nAll of the five most widely spoken Romance languages are also official languages of the European Union (with France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain being part of it).\n\n# Name and languages\nThe term [Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/romance) derives from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice, \"in [Roman](https://bliptext.com/articles/rome)\", derived from romanicus: for instance, in the expression romanice loqui, \"to speak in [Roman](https://bliptext.com/articles/rome)\" (that is, the Latin [vernacular](https://bliptext.com/articles/vernacular)), contrasted with latine loqui, \"to speak in Latin\" (Medieval Latin, the [conservative](https://bliptext.com/articles/linguistic-conservatism) version of the language used in [writing and formal contexts](https://bliptext.com/articles/abstand-and-ausbau-languages) or as a lingua franca), and with barbarice loqui, \"to speak in [Barbarian](https://bliptext.com/articles/barbarian)\" (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the [Roman](https://bliptext.com/articles/rome) Empire).\nFrom this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice, or \"in the Roman vernacular\".\nMost of the Romance-speaking area in Europe has traditionally been a [dialect continuum](https://bliptext.com/articles/dialect-continuum), where the speech variety of a location differs only slightly from that of a neighboring location, but over a longer distance these differences can accumulate to the point where two remote locations speak what may be unambiguously characterized as separate languages.\nThis makes drawing language boundaries difficult, and thus there is no unambiguous way to divide the Romance varieties into individual languages.\nEven the criterion of [mutual intelligibility](https://bliptext.com/articles/mutual-intelligibility) can become ambiguous when it comes to determining whether two language varieties belong to the same language or not.\nThe following is a list of groupings of Romance languages, with some languages chosen to exemplify each grouping.\nNot all languages are listed, and the groupings should not be interpreted as well-separated [genetic clades](https://bliptext.com/articles/cladistics) in a [tree model](https://bliptext.com/articles/tree-model).\n\n# Modern status\nThe Romance language [most widely spoken natively](https://bliptext.com/articles/list-of-languages-by-number-of-native-speakers) today is [Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/spanish-language), followed by [Portuguese](https://bliptext.com/articles/portuguese-language), [French](https://bliptext.com/articles/french-language), [Italian](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-language) and [Romanian](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-language), which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as [official](https://bliptext.com/articles/official-language) and [national languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/national-language) in dozens of countries.\nIn Europe, at least one Romance language is official in [France](https://bliptext.com/articles/france), [Portugal](https://bliptext.com/articles/portugal), [Spain](https://bliptext.com/articles/spain), [Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/italy), [Switzerland](https://bliptext.com/articles/switzerland), [Belgium](https://bliptext.com/articles/belgium), [Romania](https://bliptext.com/articles/romania), [Moldova](https://bliptext.com/articles/moldova), [Transnistria](https://bliptext.com/articles/transnistria), [Monaco](https://bliptext.com/articles/monaco), [Andorra](https://bliptext.com/articles/andorra), [San Marino](https://bliptext.com/articles/san-marino) and [Vatican City](https://bliptext.com/articles/vatican-city).\nIn these countries, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, [Romansh](https://bliptext.com/articles/romansh-language) and [Catalan](https://bliptext.com/articles/catalan-language) have constitutional official status.\nFrench, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of the [European Union](https://bliptext.com/articles/european-union).\nSpanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan were the official languages of the defunct [Latin Union](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-union); and French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the [United Nations](https://bliptext.com/articles/united-nations).\nOutside Europe, [French](https://bliptext.com/articles/french-language), [Portuguese](https://bliptext.com/articles/portuguese-language) and [Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/spanish-language) are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that emerged from the respective [colonial empires](https://bliptext.com/articles/colonial-empire).\nWith almost 500 million speakers worldwide, [Spanish is an official language](https://bliptext.com/articles/list-of-countries-and-territories-where-spanish-is-an-official-language) in [Spain](https://bliptext.com/articles/spain) and in nine countries of [South America](https://bliptext.com/articles/south-america), home to about half that continent's population; in six countries of [Central America](https://bliptext.com/articles/central-america) (all except [Belize](https://bliptext.com/articles/belize)); and in [Mexico](https://bliptext.com/articles/mexico).\nIn the [Caribbean](https://bliptext.com/articles/caribbean), it is official in [Cuba](https://bliptext.com/articles/cuba), the [Dominican Republic](https://bliptext.com/articles/dominican-republic), and [Puerto Rico](https://bliptext.com/articles/puerto-rico).\nIn all these countries, [Latin American Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-american-spanish) is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish the most native speakers of any Romance language.\nIn Africa it is one of the official languages of [Equatorial Guinea](https://bliptext.com/articles/equatorial-guinea).\nSpanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973.\nIn the 1987 constitution, Spanish was removed as an official language (replaced by English), and was listed as an optional/voluntary language along with Arabic.\nIt is currently spoken by a minority and taught in the school curriculum.\nPortuguese, in its original homeland, [Portugal](https://bliptext.com/articles/portugal), is spoken by almost the entire population of 10 million.\nAs the official language of [Brazil](https://bliptext.com/articles/brazil), it is spoken by more than 200 million people, as well as in neighboring parts of [eastern Paraguay](https://bliptext.com/articles/brasiguayos) and [northern Uruguay](https://bliptext.com/articles/riverense-portu-ol-language).\nThis accounts for slightly more than half the population of South America, making Portuguese the most spoken [official Romance language](https://bliptext.com/articles/official-language) in a single country.\nPortuguese is the official language of six African countries ([Angola](https://bliptext.com/articles/angola), [Cape Verde](https://bliptext.com/articles/cape-verde), [Guinea-Bissau](https://bliptext.com/articles/guinea-bissau), [Mozambique](https://bliptext.com/articles/mozambique), [Equatorial Guinea](https://bliptext.com/articles/equatorial-guinea), and [São Tomé and Príncipe](https://bliptext.com/articles/s-o-tom-and-pr-ncipe)), and is spoken as a native language by perhaps 16 million residents of that continent.\nIn Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages in [East Timor](https://bliptext.com/articles/east-timor) and [Macau](https://bliptext.com/articles/macau), while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia—some 400,000 —are in [Japan](https://bliptext.com/articles/japan) due to [return immigration](https://bliptext.com/articles/dekasegi) of [Japan](https://bliptext.com/articles/japan)ese Brazilians.\nIn North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language, mainly immigrants from Brazil, Portugal, and other Portuguese-speaking countries and their descendants.\nIn Oceania, Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in [East Timor](https://bliptext.com/articles/east-timor).\nIts closest relative, [Galicia](https://bliptext.com/articles/galicia-spain)n, has official status in the [autonomous community](https://bliptext.com/articles/autonomous-communities-in-spain) of [Galicia](https://bliptext.com/articles/galicia-spain) in [Spain](https://bliptext.com/articles/spain), together with Spanish.\nOutside Europe, French is spoken natively most in the Canadian province of [Quebec](https://bliptext.com/articles/quebec), and in parts of [New Brunswick](https://bliptext.com/articles/new-brunswick) and [Ontario](https://bliptext.com/articles/ontario).\nCanada is [officially bilingual](https://bliptext.com/articles/official-bilingualism-in-canada), with French and English being the official languages and government services in French theoretically mandated to be provided nationwide.\nIn parts of the Caribbean, such as [Haiti](https://bliptext.com/articles/haiti), French has official status, but most people speak creoles such as [Haiti](https://bliptext.com/articles/haiti)an Creole as their native language.\nFrench also has official status in much of Africa, with relatively few native speakers but larger numbers of second language speakers.\nAlthough [Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/italy) also had some colonial possessions before [World War II](https://bliptext.com/articles/world-war-ii), its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial domination.\nAs a result, [Italian](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-language) outside Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities in [North](https://bliptext.com/articles/north-america) and [South America](https://bliptext.com/articles/south-america) and [Australia](https://bliptext.com/articles/australia).\nIn some former Italian colonies in Africa—namely [Libya](https://bliptext.com/articles/libya), [Eritrea](https://bliptext.com/articles/eritrea) and [Somalia](https://bliptext.com/articles/somalia)—it is spoken by a few educated people in commerce and government.\n[Romania](https://bliptext.com/articles/romania) did not establish a colonial empire.\nThe native range of Romanian includes not only the [Republic of Moldova](https://bliptext.com/articles/moldova), where it is the dominant language and spoken by a majority of the population, but neighboring areas in Serbia ([Vojvodina](https://bliptext.com/articles/vojvodina) and the [Bor District](https://bliptext.com/articles/bor-district)), Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ukraine ([Bukovina](https://bliptext.com/articles/bukovina), [Budjak](https://bliptext.com/articles/budjak)) and in some villages between the [Dniester](https://bliptext.com/articles/dniester) and [Bug](https://bliptext.com/articles/bug-river) rivers.\nAs with Italian, Romanian is spoken outside of its ethnic range by immigrant communities.\nIn Europe, Romanian-speakers form about two percent of the population in [Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/italy), [Spain](https://bliptext.com/articles/spain), and [Portugal](https://bliptext.com/articles/portugal).\nRomanian is also spoken in [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel) by Romanian Jews, where it is the native language of five percent of the population, and is spoken by many more as a secondary language.\nThe [Aromanian language](https://bliptext.com/articles/aromanian-language) is spoken today by [Aromanians](https://bliptext.com/articles/aromanians) in Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, and Greece.\n[Flavio Biondo](https://bliptext.com/articles/flavio-biondo) was the first scholar to have observed (in 1435) linguistic affinities between the Romanian and [Italian](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-language) languages, as well as their common Latin origin.\nThe total of 880 million native speakers of Romance languages (ca. 2020) are divided as follows:\nCatalan is the official language of [Andorra](https://bliptext.com/articles/andorra).\nIn Spain, it is co-official with Spanish in [Catalonia](https://bliptext.com/articles/catalonia), the [Valencian Community](https://bliptext.com/articles/valencian-community) (under the name [Valencian](https://bliptext.com/articles/valencian-language)), and the [Balearic Islands](https://bliptext.com/articles/balearic-islands), and it is recognized, but not official, in an area of [Aragon](https://bliptext.com/articles/aragon) known as [La Franja](https://bliptext.com/articles/la-franja).\nIn addition, it is spoken by many residents of [Alghero](https://bliptext.com/articles/alghero), on the island of [Sardinia](https://bliptext.com/articles/sardinia), and it is co-official in that city.\n[Galician](https://bliptext.com/articles/galician-language), with more than three million speakers, is official together with Spanish in [Galicia](https://bliptext.com/articles/galicia-spain), and has legal recognition in neighbouring territories in [Castilla y León](https://bliptext.com/articles/castilla-y-le-n).\nA few other languages have official recognition on a regional or otherwise limited level; for instance, [Asturian](https://bliptext.com/articles/asturian-language) and [Aragonese](https://bliptext.com/articles/aragonese-language) in Spain; [Mirandese](https://bliptext.com/articles/mirandese-language) in Portugal; [Friulian](https://bliptext.com/articles/friulan-language), [Sardinian](https://bliptext.com/articles/sardinian-language) and [Franco-Provençal](https://bliptext.com/articles/franco-proven-al-language) in Italy; and [Romansh](https://bliptext.com/articles/romansh-language) in Switzerland.\nThe remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact.\nNational governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well as a potential source of [separatist](https://bliptext.com/articles/separatism) movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it, by extensively promoting the use of the official language, restricting the use of the other languages in the media, recognizing them as mere \"dialects\", or even persecuting them.\nAs a result, all of these languages are considered endangered to varying degrees according to the UNESCO [Red Book of Endangered Languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/red-book-of-endangered-languages), ranging from \"vulnerable\" (e.g. [Sicilian](https://bliptext.com/articles/sicilian-language) and [Venetian](https://bliptext.com/articles/venetian-language)) to \"severely endangered\" ([Franco-Provençal](https://bliptext.com/articles/franco-proven-al-language), most of the [Occitan](https://bliptext.com/articles/occitan-language) varieties).\nSince 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.\nYet it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of minority Romance languages.\n# [European extent of Romance languages in the 20th century | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Romance///20c///en.png]\n# [Proportion of speakers in the top 5 Romance languages, as of 2024 | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/2024///Updated///Total///Speakers.jpg]\n\n# History\nBetween 350 BC and 150 AD, [the expansion of the Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/campaign-history-of-the-roman-military), together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language in continental Western Europe.\nLatin also exerted a strong influence in [southeastern Britain](https://bliptext.com/articles/roman-britain), [the Roman province of Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/africa-roman-province), [western Germany](https://bliptext.com/articles/moselle-romance), [Pannonia](https://bliptext.com/articles/pannonian-romance) and the whole [Balkans](https://bliptext.com/articles/balkans).\nDuring the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and the collapse of its Western half in the fifth and sixth centuries, the spoken varieties of Latin became more isolated from each other, with the western dialects coming under heavy Germanic influence (the Goths and Franks in particular) and the eastern dialects coming under Slavic influence.\nThe dialects diverged from Latin at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies.\nThe colonial empires established by [Portugal](https://bliptext.com/articles/portuguese-empire), [Spain](https://bliptext.com/articles/spanish-empire), and [France](https://bliptext.com/articles/french-colonial-empire) 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.\nDespite other influences (e.g. [substratum](https://bliptext.com/articles/stratum-linguistics) from pre-Roman languages, especially [Continental Celtic languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/continental-celtic-languages); and [superstratum](https://bliptext.com/articles/stratum-linguistics) from later [Germanic](https://bliptext.com/articles/germanic-languages) or [Slavic](https://bliptext.com/articles/slavic-languages) invasions), the [phonology](https://bliptext.com/articles/phonology), [morphology](https://bliptext.com/articles/morphology-linguistics), and [lexicon](https://bliptext.com/articles/lexicon) of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin.\nHowever, some notable differences exist between today's Romance languages and their Roman ancestor.\nWith only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the [declension](https://bliptext.com/articles/declension) system of Latin and, as a result, have [SVO](https://bliptext.com/articles/subject-verb-object) sentence structure and make extensive use of [prepositions](https://bliptext.com/articles/prepositions).\nBy most measures, [Sardinian](https://bliptext.com/articles/sardinian-language) and Italian are the least divergent languages from Latin, while French has changed the most.\nHowever, all Romance languages are closer to each other than to [classical Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/classical-latin).\n\n## Vulgar Latin\nDocumentary evidence about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research is limited, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize.\nMany of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers, and more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome.\nIn Western Europe, Latin gradually replaced [Celtic](https://bliptext.com/articles/celtic-languages) and other [Italic languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/italic-languages), which were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin.\nCommonalities in syntax and vocabulary facilitated the adoption of Latin.\nTo some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the [Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/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.\nOther scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language.\nWith the rise of the Roman Empire, spoken Latin spread first throughout Italy and then through [southern](https://bliptext.com/articles/southern-europe), [western](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-europe), [central](https://bliptext.com/articles/central-europe), and [southeastern Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/southeastern-europe), and [northern Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/north-africa) along parts of [western](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-europe) Asia.\nLatin reached a stage when innovations became generalised around the sixth and seventh centuries.\nAfter that time and within two hundred years, it became a [dead language](https://bliptext.com/articles/language-death) since \"the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them.\"\nBy the eighth and ninth centuries Latin gave way to Romance.\n# [Length of the Roman rule and the Romance Languages | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Map///Length///of///Roman///Rule///Neo///Latin///Languages.jpg]\n# [Romance languages in Europe | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Latin///Europe.png]\n\n## Fall of the Western Roman Empire\nDuring the political [decline of the Western Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/fall-of-the-western-roman-empire) in the fifth century, there were large-scale [migrations](https://bliptext.com/articles/migration-period) into the empire, and the Latin-speaking world was fragmented into several independent states.\nCentral Europe and the [Balkans](https://bliptext.com/articles/balkans) were occupied by Germanic and [Slavic](https://bliptext.com/articles/slavs) tribes, as well as by [Huns](https://bliptext.com/articles/huns).\n[British](https://bliptext.com/articles/british-latin) and [African Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/african-romance)—the forms of Vulgar Latin used in [Britain](https://bliptext.com/articles/roman-britain) and [the Roman province of Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/africa-roman-province), where it had been spoken by much of the urban population—disappeared in the Middle Ages (as did [Moselle Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/moselle-romance) in Germany).\nBut the Germanic tribes that had penetrated [Roman Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/roman-italy), [Gaul](https://bliptext.com/articles/gaul), and [Hispania](https://bliptext.com/articles/hispania) eventually adopted Latin/Romance and the remnants of the [culture of ancient Rome](https://bliptext.com/articles/culture-of-ancient-rome) alongside existing inhabitants of those regions, and so Latin remained the dominant language there.\nIn part due to regional dialects of the Latin language and local environments, several languages evolved from it.\n\n## Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire\nMeanwhile, large-scale [migrations](https://bliptext.com/articles/migration-period) into the Eastern [Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/roman-empire) started with the [Goths](https://bliptext.com/articles/goths) and continued with [Huns](https://bliptext.com/articles/huns), [Avars](https://bliptext.com/articles/pannonian-avars), [Bulgars](https://bliptext.com/articles/bulgars), [Slavs](https://bliptext.com/articles/slavs), [Pechenegs](https://bliptext.com/articles/pechenegs), [Hungarians](https://bliptext.com/articles/hungarians) and [Cumans](https://bliptext.com/articles/cumans).\nThe invasions of [Slavs](https://bliptext.com/articles/slavs) were the most thoroughgoing, and they partially reduced the Romanic element in the [Balkans](https://bliptext.com/articles/balkans).\nThe invasion of the [Turks](https://bliptext.com/articles/ottoman-empire) and conquest of [Constantinople](https://bliptext.com/articles/constantinople) in 1453 marked the end of the empire.\nThe surviving local Romance languages were [Dalmatian](https://bliptext.com/articles/dalmatian-language) and [Common Romanian](https://bliptext.com/articles/common-romanian).\n\n## Early Romance\nOver the course of the fourth to eighth centuries, local changes in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon accumulated to the point that the speech of any locale was noticeably different from that of another.\nIn principle, differences between any two [lects](https://bliptext.com/articles/variety-linguistics) increased the more they were separated geographically, reducing easy mutual intelligibility between speakers of distant communities.\nClear evidence of some levels of change is found in the [Reichenau Glosses](https://bliptext.com/articles/reichenau-glosses), an eighth-century compilation of about 1,200 words from the fourth-century [Vulgate](https://bliptext.com/articles/vulgate) of [Jerome](https://bliptext.com/articles/jerome) that had changed in phonological form or were no longer normally used, along with their eighth-century equivalents in proto-[Franco-Provençal](https://bliptext.com/articles/franco-proven-al-language).\nThe following are some examples with reflexes in several modern Romance languages for comparison:\nIn 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](https://bliptext.com/articles/classical-latin) of c. 50 BC. It is likely that some of these words had already disappeared from casual speech by the time of the Glosses; but if so, they may well have been still widely understood, as there is no recorded evidence that the common people of the time had difficulty understanding the language.\nBy the 8th century, the situation was very different.\nDuring the late 8th century, [Charlemagne](https://bliptext.com/articles/charlemagne), holding that \"Latin of his age was by classical standards intolerably corrupt\", successfully imposed [Classical Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/classical-latin) as an artificial written vernacular for [Western Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-europe).\nUnfortunately, this meant that parishioners could no longer understand the sermons of their priests, forcing the [Council of Tours in 813](https://bliptext.com/articles/council-of-tours-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.\nBy this time, and possibly as early as the 6th century according to Price (1984), the Romance [lects](https://bliptext.com/articles/variety-linguistics) had split apart enough to be able to speak of separate [Gallo-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/gallo-romance-languages), [Ibero-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/iberian-romance-languages), [Italo-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/italo-dalmatian-languages) and [Eastern Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/eastern-romance-languages).\nSome researchers have postulated that the major divergences in the spoken dialects began or accelerated considerably in the 5th century, as the formerly widespread and efficient communication networks of the [Western Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-roman-empire) rapidly broke down, leading to the total disappearance of the [Western Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-roman-empire) by the end of the century.\nDuring the period between the 5th–10th centuries AD Romance vernaculars documentation is scarce as the normal writing language used was [Medieval Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/medieval-latin), with vernacular writing only beginning in earnest in the 11th or 12th century.\nThe earliest such texts are the [Indovinello Veronese](https://bliptext.com/articles/indovinello-veronese) from the eight century and the [Oaths of Strasbourg](https://bliptext.com/articles/oaths-of-strasbourg) from the second half of the ninth century.\n\n## Recognition of the vernaculars\nFrom the 10th century onwards, some local [vernaculars](https://bliptext.com/articles/vernacular) developed a written form and began to supplant Latin in many of its roles.\nIn some countries, such as [Portugal](https://bliptext.com/articles/portugal), this transition was expedited by force of law; whereas in others, such as [Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/italy), many prominent poets and writers used the vernacular of their own accord – some of the most famous in [Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/italy) being [Giacomo da Lentini](https://bliptext.com/articles/giacomo-da-lentini) and [Dante Alighieri](https://bliptext.com/articles/dante-alighieri).\nWell before that, the vernacular was also used for practical purposes, such as the testimonies in the [Placiti Cassinesi](https://bliptext.com/articles/placiti-cassinesi), written 960–963.\n# [Romance – Germanic language border: \n• Early Middle Ages \n• Early Twentieth Century | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Germanic///%E2%80%93///Romance///language///border///map///%28early///Middle///Ages///%E2%80%93///early///twentieth///century%29.svg]\n\n## Uniformization and standardization\nThe invention of the [printing press](https://bliptext.com/articles/printing-press) brought a tendency towards greater uniformity of [standard languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/standard-language) within political boundaries, at the expense of other Romance languages and [dialects](https://bliptext.com/articles/dialect) less favored politically.\nIn France, for instance, the dialect spoken in the region of Paris gradually spread to the entire country, and the [Occitan](https://bliptext.com/articles/occitan-language) of the south lost ground.\n\n# Samples\nLexical and grammatical similarities among the Romance languages, and between Latin and each of them, are apparent from the following examples in various Romance [lects](https://bliptext.com/articles/variety-linguistics), all meaning 'She always closes the window before she dines/before dining'.\nElla cerra sempre la ventana antes de cenar.\nCentro Cadore: La sera sempre la fenestra gnante de disna.\nAuronzo di Cadore: La sera sempro la fenestra davoi de disnà.\nGherdëina: Ëila stluj for l viere dan maië da cëina.\n(Bergamasque)]] || (Lé) la sèra sèmper sö la finèstra prima de senà.\nSome of the divergence comes from [semantic change](https://bliptext.com/articles/semantic-change): where the same root words have developed different meanings.\nFor example, the Portuguese word fresta is descended from Latin fenestra \"window\" (and is thus [cognate](https://bliptext.com/articles/cognate) to French fenêtre, Italian finestra, Romanian fereastră and so on), but now means \"skylight\" and \"slit\".\nCognates may exist but have become rare, such as hiniestra in Spanish, or dropped out of use entirely.\nThe Spanish and Portuguese terms defenestrar meaning \"to [throw through a window](https://bliptext.com/articles/defenestration)\" and fenestrado meaning \"replete with windows\" also have the same root, but are later borrowings from Latin.\nLikewise, 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.\nGalician has both fiestra (from medieval fẽestra, the ancestor of standard Portuguese fresta) and the less frequently used ventá and xanela.\nAs 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.\nSpanish, 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\".\nSardinian 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).\n\n# Classification and related languages\nAlong with Latin and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, the Romance languages make up the [Italic branch](https://bliptext.com/articles/italic-languages) of the [Indo-European family](https://bliptext.com/articles/indo-european-languages).\nIdentifying subdivisions of the Romance languages is inherently problematic, because most of the linguistic area is a [dialect continuum](https://bliptext.com/articles/dialect-continuum), and in some cases political biases can come into play.\nA tree model is often used, but the selection of criteria results in different trees.\nMost classification schemes are, implicitly or not, historical and geographic, resulting in groupings such as [Ibero-](https://bliptext.com/articles/iberian-romance-languages) and [Gallo-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/gallo-romance-languages).\nA major division can be drawn between Eastern and Western Romance, separated by the [La Spezia-Rimini line](https://bliptext.com/articles/la-spezia-rimini-line).\nThe main subfamilies that have been proposed by [Ethnologue](https://bliptext.com/articles/ethnologue) within the various classification schemes for Romance languages are:\n# [Romance languages and dialects | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Idiomas///y///dialectos///romances.png]\n\n## Ranking by distance\nAnother approach involves attempts to rank the distance of Romance languages from each other or from their common ancestor (i.e. ranking languages based on how [conservative or innovative](https://bliptext.com/articles/conservative-and-innovative-language) they are, although the same language may be conservative in some respects while innovative in others).\nBy most measures, French is the most highly differentiated Romance language, although Romanian has changed the greatest amount of its vocabulary, while Italian and Sardinian have changed the least.\nStandard Italian can be considered a \"central\" language, which is generally somewhat easy to understand to speakers of other Romance languages, whereas French and Romanian are peripheral and quite dissimilar from the rest of Romance.\n\n## Pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages\nSome Romance languages have developed varieties which seem dramatically restructured as to their grammars or to be mixtures with other languages.\nThere are several dozens of creoles of [French](https://bliptext.com/articles/french-based-creole-languages), [Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/spanish-based-creole-languages), and [Portuguese](https://bliptext.com/articles/portuguese-based-creole-languages) origin, some of them spoken as [national languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/national-language) and lingua franca in former European colonies.\n**Creoles of French:**\n**Creoles of Spanish:**\n**Creoles of Portuguese:**\n\n## Auxiliary and constructed languages\nLatin and the Romance languages have also served as the inspiration and basis of numerous auxiliary and constructed languages, so-called \"Neo-Romance languages\".\nThe concept was first developed in 1903 by Italian mathematician [Giuseppe Peano](https://bliptext.com/articles/giuseppe-peano), under the title [Latino sine flexione](https://bliptext.com/articles/latino-sine-flexione).\nHe wanted to create a naturalistic international language, as opposed to an autonomous constructed language like [Esperanto](https://bliptext.com/articles/esperanto) or [Volapük](https://bliptext.com/articles/volap-k) which were designed for maximal simplicity of lexicon and derivation of words.\nPeano used Latin as the base of his language because, as he described it, Latin had been the international scientific language until the end of the 18th century.\nOther languages developed include [Idiom Neutral](https://bliptext.com/articles/idiom-neutral) (1902), [Interlingue](https://bliptext.com/articles/interlingue)-Occidental (1922), [Interlingua](https://bliptext.com/articles/interlingua) (1951) and [Lingua Franca Nova](https://bliptext.com/articles/lingua-franca-nova) (1998).\nThe most famous and successful of these is Interlingua.\nEach of these languages has attempted to varying degrees to achieve a pseudo-Latin vocabulary as common as possible to living Romance languages.\nSome languages have been constructed specifically for communication among speakers of Romance languages, the [Pan-Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/pan-romance-language).\nThere are also languages created for artistic purposes only, such as [Talossan](https://bliptext.com/articles/talossa).\nBecause 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.\nThese include [Brithenig](https://bliptext.com/articles/brithenig) (which mirrors [Welsh](https://bliptext.com/articles/welsh-language)), Breathanach (mirrors [Irish](https://bliptext.com/articles/irish-language)), [Wenedyk](https://bliptext.com/articles/wenedyk) (mirrors [Polish](https://bliptext.com/articles/polish-language)), Þrjótrunn (mirrors [Icelandic](https://bliptext.com/articles/icelandic-language)), and Helvetian (mirrors [German](https://bliptext.com/articles/german-language)).\n\n# Sound changes\n\n## Consonants\nSignificant [sound changes](https://bliptext.com/articles/sound-change) affected the consonants of the Romance languages.\n\n### Apocope\nThere was a tendency to eliminate final consonants in Vulgar Latin, either by dropping them ([apocope](https://bliptext.com/articles/apocope)) or adding a vowel after them ([epenthesis](https://bliptext.com/articles/epenthesis)).\nMany 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\").\nMany 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).\nFinal -m was dropped in Vulgar Latin.\nEven in [Classical Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/classical-latin), final -am, -em, -um ([inflectional suffixes](https://bliptext.com/articles/suffix) of the [accusative case](https://bliptext.com/articles/accusative-case)) were often [elided](https://bliptext.com/articles/elision) in [poetic meter](https://bliptext.com/articles/meter-poetry), suggesting the m was weakly pronounced, probably marking the [nasalisation](https://bliptext.com/articles/nasal-vowel) of the vowel before it.\nThis nasal vowel lost its nasalization in the Romance languages except in monosyllables, where it became e.g. Spanish quien < quem \"whom\", French rien \"anything\" < rem \"thing\"; note especially French and Catalan mon < meum \"my (m.sg.)\" which are derived from monosyllabic > *, whereas Spanish disyllabic mío and Portuguese and Catalan monosyllabic meu are derived from disyllabic > *.\nAs a result, only the following final consonants occurred in Vulgar Latin:\nFinal -t was eventually lost in many languages, although this often occurred several centuries after the Vulgar Latin period.\nFor example, the reflex of -t was dropped in [Old French](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-french) and [Old Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-spanish) only around 1100.\nIn Old French, this occurred only when a vowel still preceded the t (generally < Latin a).\nHence amat \"he loves\" > Old French aime but venit \"he comes\" > Old French vient: the was never dropped and survives into Modern French in [liaison](https://bliptext.com/articles/liaison-french), e.g. vient-il?\n\"is he coming?\"\n(the corresponding in aime-t-il? is analogical, not inherited).\nOld French also kept the third-person plural ending -nt intact.\nIn Italo-Romance and the [Eastern Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/eastern-romance-languages), eventually all final consonants were either lost or protected by an epenthetic vowel, except for some articles and a few monosyllabic prepositions con, per, in.\nModern Standard Italian still has very few consonant-final words, although Romanian has resurfaced them through later loss of final and.\nFor example, amās \"you love\" > ame > Italian ami; amant \"they love\" > *aman > Ital.\namano.\nOn the evidence of \"sloppily written\" [Lombardic language](https://bliptext.com/articles/lombardic-language) documents, however, the loss of final in northern 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](https://bliptext.com/articles/syntactic-gemination) (raddoppiamento sintattico) that they trigger.\nIt is also thought that after a long vowel became rather than simply disappearing: nōs > noi \"we\", crās > crai \"tomorrow\" (southern Italy).\nIn unstressed syllables, the resulting diphthongs were simplified: canēs > * > cani \"dogs\"; amīcās > * > amiche \"(female) friends\", where nominative amīcae should produce **amice rather than amiche (note masculine amīcī > amici not *amichi).\nCentral [Western Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-romance-languages) eventually regained a large number of final consonants through the general loss of final and, e.g. Catalan llet \"milk\" < lactem, foc \"fire\" < focum, peix \"fish\" < piscem.\nIn 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 < -a.\nHence masculine frīgidum \"cold\" > Old French froit > froid, feminine frīgidam > Old French froide > froide.\n\n### Palatalization\nIn Romance languages the term 'palatalization' is used to describe the phonetic evolution of velar stops preceding a front vowel and of consonant clusters involving yod or of the palatal approximant itself.\nThe process involving gestural blending and articulatory reinforcement, starting from Late Latin and Early Romance, generated a new series of consonants in Romance languages.\n\n### Lenition\n[Stop consonants](https://bliptext.com/articles/stop-consonant) shifted by [lenition](https://bliptext.com/articles/lenition) in Vulgar Latin in some areas.\nThe voiced [labial consonants](https://bliptext.com/articles/labial-consonant) and (represented by ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩, respectively) both developed a [fricative](https://bliptext.com/articles/voiced-bilabial-fricative) as an intervocalic allophone.\nThis 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.\nIn many Romance languages (Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.), this fricative later developed into a ; but in others (Spanish, Galician, some Catalan and Occitan dialects, etc.) reflexes of and simply merged into a single phoneme.\nSeveral 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.\nThe dividing line between the two sets of dialects is called the [La Spezia–Rimini Line](https://bliptext.com/articles/la-spezia-rimini-line) and is one of the most important [isogloss](https://bliptext.com/articles/isogloss) bundles of the Romance dialects.\nThe changes (instances of diachronic lenition resulting in [phonological restructuring](https://bliptext.com/articles/phonological-change)) are as follows:\nSingle voiceless plosives became [voiced](https://bliptext.com/articles/voice-phonetics): -p-, -t-, -c- > -b-, -d-, -g-.\nSubsequently, in some languages they were further weakened, either becoming [fricatives](https://bliptext.com/articles/fricative) or [approximants](https://bliptext.com/articles/approximant-consonant), (as in Spanish) or disappearing entirely (such as and lost between vowels in French, but > ).\nThe following example shows progressive weakening of original /t/: e.g. vītam > Italian vita, Portuguese vida (European Portuguese ), Spanish vida (Southern Peninsular Spanish ), and French vie.\nSome scholars have speculated that these sound changes may be due in part to the influence of [Continental Celtic languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/continental-celtic-languages), while scholarship of the past few decades has proposed internal motivations.\nThe sound /h/ was lost but later reintroduced into individual Romance languages.\nThe so-called h aspiré \"aspirated h\" in French, now completely silent, was a borrowing from [Frankish](https://bliptext.com/articles/frankish-language).\nIn Spanish, word-initial /f/ changed to /h/ during its [Medieval stage](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-spanish) and was lost afterwards (for example farina > harina).\nRomanian acquired it most likely from the adstrate.\n[Consonant length](https://bliptext.com/articles/geminate-consonant) is no longer phonemically distinctive in most Romance languages.\nHowever some [languages of Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/languages-of-italy) (Italian, [Sardinian](https://bliptext.com/articles/sardinian-language), Sicilian, and numerous other varieties of central and southern Italy) do have long consonants like, etc., where the doubling indicates either actual length or, in the case of [plosives](https://bliptext.com/articles/plosive-consonants) and [affricates](https://bliptext.com/articles/affricate), a short hold before the consonant is released, in many cases with distinctive lexical value: e.g. note (notes) vs. notte (night), cade (s/he, it falls) vs. cadde (s/he, it fell), caro (dear, expensive) vs. carro (cart, car).\nThey may even occur at the beginning of words in [Romanesco](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanesco-dialect), Neapolitan, Sicilian and other southern varieties, and are occasionally indicated in writing, e.g. Sicilian cchiù (more), and ccà (here).\nIn general, the consonants, , and are long at the start of a word, while the [archiphoneme](https://bliptext.com/articles/archiphoneme) is realised as a [trill](https://bliptext.com/articles/trill-consonant) in the same position.\nIn much of central and southern Italy, the affricates /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ weaken synchronically to fricative [ʃ] and [ʒ] between vowels, while their geminate congeners do not, e.g. cacio (cheese) vs. caccio (I chase).\nIn Italian the geminates /ʃʃ/, /ɲɲ/, and /ʎʎ/ are pronounced as long [ʃʃ], [ɲɲ], and [ʎʎ] between vowels, but normally reduced to short following pause: lasciare 'let, leave' or la sciarpa 'the scarf' with [ʃʃ], but post-pausal sciarpa with [ʃ].\nA few languages have regained secondary geminate consonants.\nThe double consonants of [Piedmontese](https://bliptext.com/articles/piedmontese-language) exist only after stressed, written ë, and are not etymological: vëdde (Latin vidēre, to see), sëcca (Latin sicca, dry, feminine of sech).\nIn standard Catalan and Occitan, there exists a geminate sound 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.\n\n### Vowel prosthesis\nIn [Late Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/late-latin) a [prosthetic](https://bliptext.com/articles/prothesis-linguistics) vowel /i/ (lowered to /e/ in most languages) was inserted at the beginning of any word that began with (referred to as s impura) and a voiceless consonant (#sC- > isC-):\nWhile Western Romance words fused the prosthetic vowel with the word, cognates in Eastern Romance and southern Italo-Romance did not, e.g. Italian scrivere, spada, spirito, Stefano, and stato, Romanian scrie, spată, spirit, Ștefan and stat.\nIn Italian, syllabification rules were preserved instead by vowel-final articles, thus feminine spada as la spada, but instead of rendering the masculine *il stato, lo stato came to be the norm.\nThough receding at present, Italian once had a prosthetic maintaining /s/ syllable-final if a consonant preceded such clusters, so that 'in Switzerland' was in Svizzera.\nSome speakers still use the prothetic productively, and it is fossilized in a few set locutions such as in ispecie 'especially' or per iscritto 'in writing' (a form whose survival may have been buttressed in part by the word iscritto < Latin īnscrīptus).\n\n## Stressed vowels\n\n### Loss of vowel length, reorientation\nOne profound change that affected Vulgar Latin was the reorganisation of its [vowel](https://bliptext.com/articles/vowel) system.\nClassical Latin had five short vowels, ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ, and five [long vowels](https://bliptext.com/articles/vowel-length), ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, each of which was an individual [phoneme](https://bliptext.com/articles/phoneme) (see the table in the right, for their likely pronunciation in IPA), and four [diphthongs](https://bliptext.com/articles/diphthong), ae, oe, au and eu (five according to some authors, including ui).\nThere were also long and short versions of y, representing the [rounded vowel](https://bliptext.com/articles/close-front-rounded-vowel) in Greek borrowings, which however probably came to be pronounced even before Romance vowel changes started.\nThere 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.\nSo, for example ē was pronounced [close-mid](https://bliptext.com/articles/[close](https://bliptext.com/articles/close-vowel)-mid-vowel) while ĕ was pronounced [open-mid](https://bliptext.com/articles/open-mid-vowel), and ī was pronounced [close](https://bliptext.com/articles/close-vowel) while ĭ was pronounced near-[close](https://bliptext.com/articles/close-vowel).\nDuring the Proto-Romance period, phonemic length distinctions were lost.\nVowels came to be automatically pronounced long in stressed, [open syllables](https://bliptext.com/articles/open-syllable) (i.e. when followed by only one consonant), and pronounced short everywhere else.\nThis situation is still maintained in modern Italian: cade \"he falls\" vs. cadde \"he fell\".\nThe Proto-Romance loss of phonemic length originally produced a system with nine different quality distinctions in monophthongs, where only original had merged.\nSoon, however, many of these vowels coalesced:\nFurther variants are found in southern Italy and Corsica, which also boasts a completely distinct system.\nThe Sardinian-type vowel system is also found in a small region belonging to the [Lausberg area](https://bliptext.com/articles/lausberg-area) (also known as [Lausberg](https://bliptext.com/articles/heinrich-lausberg) zone; compare ) of southern Italy, in southern [Basilicata](https://bliptext.com/articles/basilicata), and there is evidence that the Romanian-type \"compromise\" vowel system was once characteristic of most of southern Italy, although it is now limited to a small area in western [Basilicata](https://bliptext.com/articles/basilicata) centered on the [Castelmezzano dialect](https://bliptext.com/articles/castelmezzano-dialect), the area being known as Vorposten, the German word for 'outpost'.\nThe [Sicilian vowel system](https://bliptext.com/articles/sicilian-vowel-system), now generally thought to be a development based on the Italo-Western system, is also represented in southern Italy, in southern [Cilento](https://bliptext.com/articles/cilento), [Calabria](https://bliptext.com/articles/calabria) and the southern tip of [Apulia](https://bliptext.com/articles/apulia), and may have been more widespread in the past.\nThe greatest variety of vowel systems outside of southern Italy is found in Corsica, where the Italo-Western type is represented in most of the north and center and the Sardinian type in the south, as well as a system resembling the Sicilian vowel system (and even more closely the Carovignese system) in the [Cap Corse](https://bliptext.com/articles/cap-corse) region; finally, in between the Italo-Western and Sardinian system is found, in the [Taravo](https://bliptext.com/articles/taravo) region, a unique vowel system that cannot be derived from any other system, which has reflexes like Sardinian for the most part, but the short high vowels of Latin are uniquely reflected as mid-low vowels.\nThe Proto-Romance allophonic vowel-length system was phonemicized in the [Gallo-Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/gallo-romance-languages) as a result of the loss of many final vowels.\nSome northern Italian languages (e.g. [Friulian](https://bliptext.com/articles/friulian-language)) still maintain this secondary phonemic length, but most languages dropped it by either diphthongizing or shortening the new long vowels.\nFrench phonemicized a third vowel length system around AD 1300 as a result of the sound change /VsC/ > /VhC/ > (where V is any vowel and C any consonant).\nThis vowel length began to be lost in Early Modern French, but the long vowels are still usually marked with a circumflex (and continue to be distinguished regionally, chiefly in Belgium).\nA fourth vowel length system, still non-phonemic, has now arisen: All nasal vowels as well as the oral vowels (which mostly derive from former long vowels) are pronounced long in all stressed [closed syllables](https://bliptext.com/articles/closed-syllable), and all vowels are pronounced long in syllables closed by the voiced fricatives.\nThis system in turn has been phonemicized in some varieties (e.g. [Haitian Creole](https://bliptext.com/articles/haitian-creole)), as a result of the loss of final.\n\n### Latin diphthongs\nThe Latin diphthongs ae and oe, pronounced and in earlier Latin, were early on monophthongized.\nae became by the 1st century at the latest.\nAlthough this sound was still distinct from all existing vowels, the neutralization of Latin vowel length eventually caused its merger with < short e: e.g. caelum \"sky\" > French ciel, Spanish/Italian cielo, Portuguese céu, with the same vowel as in mele \"honey\" > French/Spanish miel, Italian miele, Portuguese mel.\nSome words show an early merger of ae with, as in praeda \"booty\" > *prēda > French proie (vs. expected **priée), Italian preda (not **prieda) \"prey\"; or faenum \"hay\" > *fēnum > Spanish heno, French foin (but Italian fieno /fjɛno/).\noe generally merged with : poenam \"punishment\" > Romance * > Spanish/Italian pena, French peine; foedus \"ugly\" > Romance * > Spanish feo, Portuguese feio.\nThere 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 ) and so oe was mostly limited to Greek loanwords, which were typically learned (high-register) terms.\nau merged with ō in the popular speech of Rome already by the 1st century.\nA number of authors remarked on this explicitly, e.g. [Cicero](https://bliptext.com/articles/cicero)'s taunt that the populist politician [Publius Clodius Pulcher](https://bliptext.com/articles/publius-clodius-pulcher) had changed his name from Claudius to ingratiate himself with the masses.\nThis 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.\nFor example, Italian and French have as the usual reflex, but this post-dates diphthongization of and the French-specific palatalization > (hence causa > French chose, Italian cosa not **cuosa).\nSpanish has, but Portuguese spelling maintains ⟨ou⟩, which has developed to (and still remains as in some dialects, and in others).\nOccitan, Dalmatian, Sardinian, and many other minority Romance languages still have while in Romanian it underwent diaresis like in aurum > aur (a-ur).\nA few common words, however, show an early merger with ō, evidently reflecting a generalization of the popular Roman pronunciation: e.g. French queue, Italian coda , Occitan co(d)a, Romanian coadă (all meaning \"tail\") must all derive from cōda rather than Classical cauda.\nSimilarly, Spanish oreja, 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](https://bliptext.com/articles/appendix-probi).\n\n### Further developments\n\n#### Metaphony\nAn early process that operated in all Romance languages to varying degrees was [metaphony](https://bliptext.com/articles/metaphony) (vowel mutation), conceptually similar to the [umlaut](https://bliptext.com/articles/germanic-umlaut) process so characteristic of the [Germanic languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/germanic-languages).\nDepending on the language, certain stressed vowels were raised (or sometimes diphthongized) either by a final /i/ or /u/ or by a directly following /j/.\nMetaphony 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.\nIn 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.\nSome examples:\n\n#### Diphthongization\nA number of languages [diphthongized](https://bliptext.com/articles/diphthongization) some of the free vowels, especially the open-mid vowels :\nThese diphthongization had the effect of reducing or eliminating the distinctions between open-mid and close-mid vowels in many languages.\nIn Spanish and Romanian, all open-mid vowels were diphthongized, and the distinction disappeared entirely.\nPortuguese 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](https://bliptext.com/articles/)).\nOther than before palatalized consonants, Catalan keeps intact, but split in a complex fashion into and then coalesced again in the standard dialect ([Eastern Catalan](https://bliptext.com/articles/eastern-catalan)) in such a way that most original have reversed their quality to become.\nIn French and Italian, the distinction between open-mid and close-mid vowels occurred only in closed syllables.\nStandard Italian more or less maintains this.\nIn French, /e/ and merged by the twelfth century or so, and the distinction between and was eliminated without merging by the sound changes,.\nGenerally this led to a situation where both and occur allophonically, with the close-mid vowels in [open syllables](https://bliptext.com/articles/open-syllable) and the open-mid vowels in [closed syllables](https://bliptext.com/articles/closed-syllable).\nIn French, both and were partly rephonemicized: Both and occur in open syllables as a result of, and both and occur in closed syllables as a result of.\nOld 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/.\nDuring 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 > beaus.\nBy the end of the Middle French period, all falling diphthongs either monophthongized or switched to rising diphthongs: proto-OF > early OF > modern spelling ⟨ai ei i oi ui oi ui au eau eu i ou ou u⟩ > mod.\nFrench.\n\n#### Nasalization\nIn both French and Portuguese, [nasal vowels](https://bliptext.com/articles/nasal-vowel) eventually developed from sequences of a vowel followed by a nasal consonant (/m/ or /n/).\nOriginally, all vowels in both languages were nasalized before any nasal consonants, and nasal consonants not immediately followed by a vowel were eventually dropped.\nIn 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 > donne, fēminam > femme.\nOther vowels remained nasalized, and were dramatically lowered: fīnem \"end\" > fin (often pronounced ); linguam \"tongue\" > langue ; ūnum \"one\" > un.\nIn Portuguese, /n/ between vowels was dropped, and the resulting [hiatus](https://bliptext.com/articles/hiatus-linguistics) eliminated through vowel contraction of various sorts, often producing diphthongs: manum, *manōs > PWR *manu, ˈmanos \"hand(s)\" > mão, mãos ; canem, canēs \"dog(s)\" > PWR *kane, ˈkanes > *can, ˈcanes > cão, cães ; ratiōnem, ratiōnēs \"reason(s)\" > PWR *raˈdʲzʲone, raˈdʲzʲones > *raˈdzon, raˈdzones > razão, razões (Brazil), (Portugal).\nSometimes the nasalization was eliminated: lūna \"moon\" > Galician-Portuguese lũa > lua; vēna \"vein\" > Galician-Portuguese vẽa > veia.\nNasal vowels that remained actually tend to be raised (rather than lowered, as in French): fīnem \"end\" > fim ; centum \"hundred\" > PWR tʲsʲɛnto > cento ; pontem \"bridge\" > PWR pɔnte > ponte (Brazil), (Portugal).\nRomanian shows evidence of past nasalization phenomena, the loss of palatal nasal [ɲ] in vie < Lat. vinia, and the rhotacism of intervocalic /n/ in words like mărunt < Lat. minutu for example.\nThe effect of nasalization is observed in vowel closing to /i ɨ u/ before single /n/ and nasal+consonant clusters.\nLatin /nn/ and /m/ did not cause the same effect.\n\n### Front-rounded vowels\nCharacteristic of the [Gallo-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/gallo-romance-languages) and [Rhaeto-Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/rhaeto-romance-languages) are the [front rounded vowels](https://bliptext.com/articles/front-rounded-vowel).\nAll of these languages, with the exception of [Catalan](https://bliptext.com/articles/catalan-language), show an unconditional change /u/ > /y/, e.g. lūnam > French lune, Occitan.\nMany of the languages in Switzerland and Italy show the further change /y/ > /i/.\nAlso very common is some variation of the French development (lengthened in [open syllables](https://bliptext.com/articles/open-syllable)) > >, with mid back vowels diphthongizing in some circumstances and then re-monophthongizing into mid-front rounded vowels.\n(French has both and, with developing from in certain circumstances.)\n\n## Unstressed vowels\nThere was more variability in the result of the unstressed vowels.\nOriginally 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.\nIn Italo-Western Romance, however, vowels in unstressed syllables were significantly different from stressed vowels, with yet a third outcome for final unstressed syllables.\nIn non-final unstressed syllables, the seven-vowel system of stressed syllables developed, but then the low-mid vowels merged into the high-mid vowels.\nThis system is still preserved, largely or completely, in all of the conservative Romance languages (e.g. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan).\nIn final unstressed syllables, results were somewhat complex.\nOne of the more difficult issues is the development of final short -u, which appears to have been raised to rather than lowered to, as happened in all other syllables.\nHowever, it is possible that in reality, final comes from long *-ū < -um, where original final -m caused vowel lengthening as well as nasalization.\nEvidence of this comes from [Rhaeto-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/rhaeto-romance-languages), in particular [Sursilvan](https://bliptext.com/articles/sursilvan), which preserves reflexes of both final -us and -um, and where the latter, but not the former, triggers [metaphony](https://bliptext.com/articles/).\nThis suggests the development -us > >, but -um > >.\nThe 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:\nVarious later changes happened in individual languages, e.g.:\n\n## Intertonic vowels\nThe so-called intertonic vowels are word-internal unstressed vowels, i.e. not in the initial, final, or tonic (i.e. stressed) syllable, hence intertonic.\nIntertonic vowels were the most subject to loss or modification.\nAlready 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.\nBut many languages ultimately dropped almost all intertonic vowels.\nGenerally, those languages south and east of the [La Spezia–Rimini Line](https://bliptext.com/articles/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/.\nStandard Italian generally maintained intertonic vowels, but typically raised unstressed /e/ > /i/.\nExamples:\nPortuguese is more conservative in maintaining some intertonic vowels other than /a/: e.g. *offerḗscere \"to offer\" > Portuguese oferecer vs. Spanish ofrecer, French offrir (< *offerīre).\nFrench, on the other hand, drops even intertonic /a/ after the stress: Stéphanum \"Stephen\" > Spanish Esteban but Old French Estievne > French Étienne.\nMany cases of /a/ before the stress also ultimately dropped in French: sacraméntum \"sacrament\" > Old French sairement > French serment \"oath\".\n\n# Writing systems\nThe Romance languages for the most part have continued to use the Latin alphabet while adapting it to their evolution.\nOne exception was Romanian, where before the nineteenth century, the [Romanian Cyrillic alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-cyrillic-alphabet) was used due to Slavic influence after the Roman retreat.\nA Cyrillic alphabet was also used for Romanian (then called Moldovan) in the [USSR](https://bliptext.com/articles/soviet-union).\nThe non-Christian populations of Spain also used the scripts of their religions ([Arabic](https://bliptext.com/articles/arabic-script) and [Hebrew](https://bliptext.com/articles/hebrew-script)) to write Romance languages such as [Judaeo-Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/judaeo-spanish) and [Mozarabic](https://bliptext.com/articles/mozarabic-language) in [aljamiado](https://bliptext.com/articles/aljamiado).\n\n## Letters\nThe [classical Latin alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/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 – was [modified and augmented](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-script-alphabet) in various ways to yield the spelling systems of the Romance languages.\nIn particular, the single Latin letter V split into V (consonant) and U (vowel), and the letter I split into I and J.\nThe Latin letter K and the new letter W, which came to be widely used in [Germanic languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/germanic-languages), are seldom used in most Romance languages – mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words.\nIndeed, in Italian prose is properly.\nPortuguese and Catalan eschew importation of \"foreign\" letters more than most languages.\nThus Wikipedia is in Catalan but in Spanish; chikungunya, sandwich, kiwi are, , in Portuguese but , , in Spanish.\nWhile 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.\nSome letters, notably H and Q, have been variously combined in [digraphs](https://bliptext.com/articles/digraph-orthography) or [trigraphs](https://bliptext.com/articles/trigraph-orthography) (see below) to represent phonetic phenomena that could not be recorded with the basic Latin alphabet, or to get around previously established spelling conventions.\nMost languages added auxiliary marks ([diacritics](https://bliptext.com/articles/diacritic)) to some letters, for these and other purposes.\nThe spelling systems of most Romance languages are fairly simple, and consistent within any language.\nSpelling rules are typically [phonemic](https://bliptext.com/articles/phonemic-orthography) (as opposed to being strictly [phonetic](https://bliptext.com/articles/phonetic-transcription)); as a result of this, the actual pronunciation of standard written forms can vary substantially according to the speaker's accent (which may differ by region) or the position of a sound in the word or utterance ([allophony](https://bliptext.com/articles/allophone)).\nThe following letters have notably different values between languages, or between Latin and the Romance languages:\nOtherwise, letters that are not combined as digraphs generally represent the same phonemes as suggested by the [International Phonetic Alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/international-phonetic-alphabet) (IPA), whose design was, in fact, greatly influenced by Romance spelling systems.\n\n## Digraphs and trigraphs\nSince 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.\nThe 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\".\nThese were once [aspirated](https://bliptext.com/articles/aspiration-phonetics) sounds in Greek before changing to corresponding fricatives, and the H represented what sounded to the Romans like an following, , and respectively.\nSome of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:\nWhile 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.\nOnly French has kept these [etymological](https://bliptext.com/articles/etymology) spellings, which now represent or, , and , respectively.\n\n### Double consonants\n[Gemination](https://bliptext.com/articles/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.\nIn [Jèrriais](https://bliptext.com/articles/j-rriais), long consonants are marked with an apostrophe: s's is a long, ss's is a long , and t't is a long.\nThe phonemic contrast between geminate and single consonants is widespread in [Italian](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-language), and normally indicated in the traditional orthography: fatto 'done' vs. fato 'fate, destiny'; cadde 's/he, it fell' vs. cade 's/he, it falls'.\nThe double consonants in French orthography, however, are merely etymological.\nIn Catalan, the gemination of l is marked by a punt volat (\"flying point\"): l·l.\n\n## Diacritics\nRomance languages also introduced various marks ([diacritics](https://bliptext.com/articles/diacritic)) that may be attached to some letters, for various purposes.\nIn 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.\nDiacritics are also used to mark word stress, to indicate exceptional pronunciation of letters in certain words, and to distinguish words with same pronunciation ([homophones](https://bliptext.com/articles/homophone)).\nDepending on the language, some letter-diacritic combinations may be considered distinct letters, e.g. for the purposes of [lexical sorting](https://bliptext.com/articles/alphabetical-order).\nThis is the case, for example, of Romanian ș and Spanish ñ.\nThe following are the most common use of diacritics in Romance languages.\n\n## Upper and lowercase\nMost languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or \"[cases](https://bliptext.com/articles/letter-case)\" of the alphabet: [majuscule](https://bliptext.com/articles/letter-case) (\"uppercase\" or \"capital letters\"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and [minuscule](https://bliptext.com/articles/letter-case) (\"lowercase\"), derived from [Carolingian writing](https://bliptext.com/articles/carolingian-minuscule) and Medieval [quill pen](https://bliptext.com/articles/quill-pen) handwriting which were later adapted by printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.\nIn particular, all Romance languages capitalize (use uppercase for the first letter of) the following words: the first word of each complete [sentence](https://bliptext.com/articles/sentence-linguistics), most words in names of people, places, and organizations, and most words in titles of books.\nThe Romance languages do not follow the German practice of capitalizing all nouns including common ones.\nUnlike 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\").\nHowever, each language has some exceptions to this general rule.\n\n# Vocabulary comparison\nThe tables below provide a vocabulary comparison that illustrates a number of examples of sound shifts that have occurred between Latin and Romance languages.\nWords are given in their conventional spellings.\nIn addition, for French the actual pronunciation is given, due to the dramatic differences between spelling and pronunciation.\n(French spelling approximately reflects the pronunciation of [Old French](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-french), c. 1200 AD.)\n\n## Degrees of lexical similarity among the Romance languages\nData from [Ethnologue](https://bliptext.com/articles/ethnologue):","current_revision":null,"created_by":"kACnuQmH5k9Nr5VNVEpVeg7XpvUmMctD","created_at":"2025-01-25T17:35:50.753Z","updated_at":"2025-01-25T17:35:50.753Z","search_vector":"'languag':2 'romanc':1","search_content":" \n**Name:** Romance \n**Altname:** Latin/Neo-Latin \n**Region:** Originated in [Old Latium](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-latium) on the [Italian peninsula](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-peninsula), now spoken in [Latin Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/languages-of-europe) (parts of [Eastern Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/eastern-europe), [Southern Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/southern-europe), and [Western Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-europe)) and [Latin America](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-america) (a majority of the countries of [Central America](https://bliptext.com/articles/central-america) and [South America](https://bliptext.com/articles/south-america)), as well as parts of [Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/africa) (Latin [Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/africa)), [Asia](https://bliptext.com/articles/asia), and [Oceania](https://bliptext.com/articles/oceania). \n**Familycolor:** Indo-European \n**Fam 2:** [Italic](https://bliptext.com/articles/italic-languages) \n**Fam 3:** [Latino-Faliscan](https://bliptext.com/articles/latino-faliscan-languages) \n**Fam 4:** [Latinic](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin) \n**Ancestor:** [Old Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-latin) \n**Ancestor 2:** [Vulgar Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vulgar-latin) \n**Protoname:** [Proto-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/proto-romance-language) \n**Child 1:** [Italo-Western](https://bliptext.com/articles/italo-western-languages) \n**Child 2:** [Eastern Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/eastern-romance-languages) \n**Child 3:** [Southern Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/southern-romance-languages) \n**Child 4:** [Pannonian](https://bliptext.com/articles/pannonian-latin) † \n**Child 5:** [British](https://bliptext.com/articles/british-latin) † \n**Iso 2:** roa \n**Iso 5:** roa \n**Glotto:** roma1334 \n**Glottorefname:** Romance \n**Lingua:** 51- (phylozone) \n**Map:** Romance languages.png \n**Mapcaption:** Romance languages in Europe \n**Map 2:** Detailed SVG map of the Romance-speaking world.svg \n**Mapcaption 2:** Romance languages globally · {{legend|#045a8d|Majority native language}} · {{legend|#0674b6|Co-official and majority native language}} · {{legend|#439dd4|Official but minority native language}} · {{legend|#9bbae1|Cultural or secondary language}} \n \n\n# \nThe **Romance [languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/language)**, also known as the **Latin** or Neo-**Latin** [languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/language), are the [languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/language) that are [directly descended](https://bliptext.com/articles/language-family) from Vulgar **Latin**.\nThey are the only extant subgroup of the [Italic branch](https://bliptext.com/articles/italic-languages) of the [Indo-European language family](https://bliptext.com/articles/indo-european-languages).\nThe five [most widely spoken Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/list-of-languages-by-number-of-native-speakers) by number of native speakers are:\nThe Romance languages spread throughout the world owing to the period of [[Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/europe)an colonialism](https://bliptext.com/articles/european-colonialism) beginning in the 15th century; there are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the [Americas](https://bliptext.com/articles/americas), [Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/europe), and parts of [Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/africa).\nPortuguese, French and Spanish also have many non-native speakers and are in widespread use as [lingua francas](https://bliptext.com/articles/lingua-franca).\nThere are also numerous [regional](https://bliptext.com/articles/regional-languages) Romance languages and dialects.\nAll of the five most widely spoken Romance languages are also official languages of the European Union (with France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain being part of it).\n\n# Name and languages\nThe term [[Roman](https://bliptext.com/articles/rome)ce](https://bliptext.com/articles/romance) derives from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice, \"in [Roman](https://bliptext.com/articles/rome)\", derived from romanicus: for instance, in the expression romanice loqui, \"to speak in [Roman](https://bliptext.com/articles/rome)\" (that is, the Latin [vernacular](https://bliptext.com/articles/vernacular)), contrasted with latine loqui, \"to speak in Latin\" (Medieval Latin, the [conservative](https://bliptext.com/articles/linguistic-conservatism) version of the language used in [writing and formal contexts](https://bliptext.com/articles/abstand-and-ausbau-languages) or as a lingua franca), and with barbarice loqui, \"to speak in [Barbarian](https://bliptext.com/articles/barbarian)\" (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the [Roman](https://bliptext.com/articles/rome) Empire).\nFrom this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice, or \"in the Roman vernacular\".\nMost of the Romance-speaking area in Europe has traditionally been a [dialect continuum](https://bliptext.com/articles/dialect-continuum), where the speech variety of a location differs only slightly from that of a neighboring location, but over a longer distance these differences can accumulate to the point where two remote locations speak what may be unambiguously characterized as separate languages.\nThis makes drawing language boundaries difficult, and thus there is no unambiguous way to divide the Romance varieties into individual languages.\nEven the criterion of [mutual intelligibility](https://bliptext.com/articles/mutual-intelligibility) can become ambiguous when it comes to determining whether two language varieties belong to the same language or not.\nThe following is a list of groupings of Romance languages, with some languages chosen to exemplify each grouping.\nNot all languages are listed, and the groupings should not be interpreted as well-separated [genetic clades](https://bliptext.com/articles/cladistics) in a [tree model](https://bliptext.com/articles/tree-model).\n\n# Modern status\nThe Romance language [most widely spoken natively](https://bliptext.com/articles/list-of-languages-by-number-of-native-speakers) today is [Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/spanish-language), followed by [Portuguese](https://bliptext.com/articles/portuguese-language), [French](https://bliptext.com/articles/french-language), [Italian](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-language) and [Romanian](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-language), which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as [official](https://bliptext.com/articles/official-language) and [national languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/national-language) in dozens of countries.\nIn Europe, at least one Romance language is official in [France](https://bliptext.com/articles/france), [Portugal](https://bliptext.com/articles/portugal), [Spain](https://bliptext.com/articles/spain), [Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/italy), [Switzerland](https://bliptext.com/articles/switzerland), [Belgium](https://bliptext.com/articles/belgium), [Romania](https://bliptext.com/articles/romania), [Moldova](https://bliptext.com/articles/moldova), [Transnistria](https://bliptext.com/articles/transnistria), [Monaco](https://bliptext.com/articles/monaco), [Andorra](https://bliptext.com/articles/andorra), [San Marino](https://bliptext.com/articles/san-marino) and [Vatican City](https://bliptext.com/articles/vatican-city).\nIn these countries, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, [Romansh](https://bliptext.com/articles/romansh-language) and [Catalan](https://bliptext.com/articles/catalan-language) have constitutional official status.\nFrench, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of the [European Union](https://bliptext.com/articles/european-union).\nSpanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan were the official languages of the defunct [Latin Union](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-union); and French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the [United Nations](https://bliptext.com/articles/united-nations).\nOutside Europe, [French](https://bliptext.com/articles/french-language), [Portuguese](https://bliptext.com/articles/portuguese-language) and [Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/spanish-language) are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that emerged from the respective [colonial empires](https://bliptext.com/articles/colonial-empire).\nWith almost 500 million speakers worldwide, [Spanish is an official language](https://bliptext.com/articles/list-of-countries-and-territories-where-spanish-is-an-official-language) in [Spain](https://bliptext.com/articles/spain) and in nine countries of [South America](https://bliptext.com/articles/south-america), home to about half that continent's population; in six countries of [Central America](https://bliptext.com/articles/central-america) (all except [Belize](https://bliptext.com/articles/belize)); and in [Mexico](https://bliptext.com/articles/mexico).\nIn the [Caribbean](https://bliptext.com/articles/caribbean), it is official in [Cuba](https://bliptext.com/articles/cuba), the [Dominican Republic](https://bliptext.com/articles/dominican-republic), and [Puerto Rico](https://bliptext.com/articles/puerto-rico).\nIn all these countries, [Latin American Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-american-spanish) is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish the most native speakers of any Romance language.\nIn Africa it is one of the official languages of [Equatorial Guinea](https://bliptext.com/articles/equatorial-guinea).\nSpanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973.\nIn the 1987 constitution, Spanish was removed as an official language (replaced by English), and was listed as an optional/voluntary language along with Arabic.\nIt is currently spoken by a minority and taught in the school curriculum.\nPortuguese, in its original homeland, [Portugal](https://bliptext.com/articles/portugal), is spoken by almost the entire population of 10 million.\nAs the official language of [Brazil](https://bliptext.com/articles/brazil), it is spoken by more than 200 million people, as well as in neighboring parts of [eastern Paraguay](https://bliptext.com/articles/brasiguayos) and [northern Uruguay](https://bliptext.com/articles/riverense-portu-ol-language).\nThis accounts for slightly more than half the population of South America, making Portuguese the most spoken [official Romance language](https://bliptext.com/articles/official-language) in a single country.\nPortuguese is the official language of six African countries ([Angola](https://bliptext.com/articles/angola), [Cape Verde](https://bliptext.com/articles/cape-verde), [Guinea-Bissau](https://bliptext.com/articles/guinea-bissau), [Mozambique](https://bliptext.com/articles/mozambique), [Equatorial Guinea](https://bliptext.com/articles/equatorial-guinea), and [São Tomé and Príncipe](https://bliptext.com/articles/s-o-tom-and-pr-ncipe)), and is spoken as a native language by perhaps 16 million residents of that continent.\nIn Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages in [East Timor](https://bliptext.com/articles/east-timor) and [Macau](https://bliptext.com/articles/macau), while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia—some 400,000 —are in [Japan](https://bliptext.com/articles/japan) due to [return immigration](https://bliptext.com/articles/dekasegi) of [Japan](https://bliptext.com/articles/japan)ese Brazilians.\nIn North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language, mainly immigrants from Brazil, Portugal, and other Portuguese-speaking countries and their descendants.\nIn Oceania, Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in [East Timor](https://bliptext.com/articles/east-timor).\nIts closest relative, [Galicia](https://bliptext.com/articles/galicia-spain)n, has official status in the [autonomous community](https://bliptext.com/articles/autonomous-communities-in-spain) of [Galicia](https://bliptext.com/articles/galicia-spain) in [Spain](https://bliptext.com/articles/spain), together with Spanish.\nOutside Europe, French is spoken natively most in the Canadian province of [Quebec](https://bliptext.com/articles/quebec), and in parts of [New Brunswick](https://bliptext.com/articles/new-brunswick) and [Ontario](https://bliptext.com/articles/ontario).\nCanada is [officially bilingual](https://bliptext.com/articles/official-bilingualism-in-canada), with French and English being the official languages and government services in French theoretically mandated to be provided nationwide.\nIn parts of the Caribbean, such as [Haiti](https://bliptext.com/articles/haiti), French has official status, but most people speak creoles such as [Haiti](https://bliptext.com/articles/haiti)an Creole as their native language.\nFrench also has official status in much of Africa, with relatively few native speakers but larger numbers of second language speakers.\nAlthough [Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/italy) also had some colonial possessions before [World War II](https://bliptext.com/articles/world-war-ii), its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial domination.\nAs a result, [Italian](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-language) outside Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities in [North](https://bliptext.com/articles/north-america) and [South America](https://bliptext.com/articles/south-america) and [Australia](https://bliptext.com/articles/australia).\nIn some former Italian colonies in Africa—namely [Libya](https://bliptext.com/articles/libya), [Eritrea](https://bliptext.com/articles/eritrea) and [Somalia](https://bliptext.com/articles/somalia)—it is spoken by a few educated people in commerce and government.\n[Romania](https://bliptext.com/articles/romania) did not establish a colonial empire.\nThe native range of Romanian includes not only the [Republic of Moldova](https://bliptext.com/articles/moldova), where it is the dominant language and spoken by a majority of the population, but neighboring areas in Serbia ([Vojvodina](https://bliptext.com/articles/vojvodina) and the [Bor District](https://bliptext.com/articles/bor-district)), Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ukraine ([Bukovina](https://bliptext.com/articles/bukovina), [Budjak](https://bliptext.com/articles/budjak)) and in some villages between the [Dniester](https://bliptext.com/articles/dniester) and [Bug](https://bliptext.com/articles/bug-river) rivers.\nAs with Italian, Romanian is spoken outside of its ethnic range by immigrant communities.\nIn Europe, Romanian-speakers form about two percent of the population in [Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/italy), [Spain](https://bliptext.com/articles/spain), and [Portugal](https://bliptext.com/articles/portugal).\nRomanian is also spoken in [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel) by Romanian Jews, where it is the native language of five percent of the population, and is spoken by many more as a secondary language.\nThe [Aromanian language](https://bliptext.com/articles/aromanian-language) is spoken today by [Aromanians](https://bliptext.com/articles/aromanians) in Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, and Greece.\n[Flavio Biondo](https://bliptext.com/articles/flavio-biondo) was the first scholar to have observed (in 1435) linguistic affinities between the Romanian and [Italian](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-language) languages, as well as their common Latin origin.\nThe total of 880 million native speakers of Romance languages (ca. 2020) are divided as follows:\nCatalan is the official language of [Andorra](https://bliptext.com/articles/andorra).\nIn Spain, it is co-official with Spanish in [Catalonia](https://bliptext.com/articles/catalonia), the [[Valencian](https://bliptext.com/articles/valencian-language) Community](https://bliptext.com/articles/valencian-community) (under the name [Valencian](https://bliptext.com/articles/valencian-language)), and the [Balearic Islands](https://bliptext.com/articles/balearic-islands), and it is recognized, but not official, in an area of [Aragon](https://bliptext.com/articles/aragon) known as [La Franja](https://bliptext.com/articles/la-franja).\nIn addition, it is spoken by many residents of [Alghero](https://bliptext.com/articles/alghero), on the island of [Sardinia](https://bliptext.com/articles/sardinia), and it is co-official in that city.\n[[Galicia](https://bliptext.com/articles/galicia-spain)n](https://bliptext.com/articles/galician-language), with more than three million speakers, is official together with Spanish in [Galicia](https://bliptext.com/articles/galicia-spain), and has legal recognition in neighbouring territories in [Castilla y León](https://bliptext.com/articles/castilla-y-le-n).\nA few other languages have official recognition on a regional or otherwise limited level; for instance, [Asturian](https://bliptext.com/articles/asturian-language) and [Aragonese](https://bliptext.com/articles/aragonese-language) in Spain; [Mirandese](https://bliptext.com/articles/mirandese-language) in Portugal; [Friulian](https://bliptext.com/articles/friulan-language), [Sardinian](https://bliptext.com/articles/sardinian-language) and [Franco-Provençal](https://bliptext.com/articles/franco-proven-al-language) in Italy; and [Romansh](https://bliptext.com/articles/romansh-language) in Switzerland.\nThe remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact.\nNational governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well as a potential source of [separatist](https://bliptext.com/articles/separatism) movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it, by extensively promoting the use of the official language, restricting the use of the other languages in the media, recognizing them as mere \"dialects\", or even persecuting them.\nAs a result, all of these languages are considered endangered to varying degrees according to the UNESCO [Red Book of Endangered Languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/red-book-of-endangered-languages), ranging from \"vulnerable\" (e.g. [Sicilian](https://bliptext.com/articles/sicilian-language) and [Venetian](https://bliptext.com/articles/venetian-language)) to \"severely endangered\" ([Franco-Provençal](https://bliptext.com/articles/franco-proven-al-language), most of the [Occitan](https://bliptext.com/articles/occitan-language) varieties).\nSince 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.\nYet it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of minority Romance languages.\n# [European extent of Romance languages in the 20th century | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Romance///20c///en.png]\n# [Proportion of speakers in the top 5 Romance languages, as of 2024 | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/2024///Updated///Total///Speakers.jpg]\n\n# History\nBetween 350 BC and 150 AD, [the expansion of the Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/campaign-history-of-the-roman-military), together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language in continental Western Europe.\nLatin also exerted a strong influence in [southeastern Britain](https://bliptext.com/articles/roman-britain), [the Roman province of Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/africa-roman-province), [western Germany](https://bliptext.com/articles/moselle-romance), [Pannonia](https://bliptext.com/articles/pannonian-romance) and the whole [Balkans](https://bliptext.com/articles/balkans).\nDuring the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and the collapse of its Western half in the fifth and sixth centuries, the spoken varieties of Latin became more isolated from each other, with the western dialects coming under heavy Germanic influence (the Goths and Franks in particular) and the eastern dialects coming under Slavic influence.\nThe dialects diverged from Latin at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies.\nThe colonial empires established by [Portugal](https://bliptext.com/articles/portuguese-empire), [Spain](https://bliptext.com/articles/spanish-empire), and [France](https://bliptext.com/articles/french-colonial-empire) 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.\nDespite other influences (e.g. [substratum](https://bliptext.com/articles/stratum-linguistics) from pre-Roman languages, especially [Continental Celtic languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/continental-celtic-languages); and [superstratum](https://bliptext.com/articles/stratum-linguistics) from later [Germanic](https://bliptext.com/articles/germanic-languages) or [Slavic](https://bliptext.com/articles/slavic-languages) invasions), the [phonology](https://bliptext.com/articles/phonology), [morphology](https://bliptext.com/articles/morphology-linguistics), and [lexicon](https://bliptext.com/articles/lexicon) of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin.\nHowever, some notable differences exist between today's Romance languages and their Roman ancestor.\nWith only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the [declension](https://bliptext.com/articles/declension) system of Latin and, as a result, have [SVO](https://bliptext.com/articles/subject-verb-object) sentence structure and make extensive use of [prepositions](https://bliptext.com/articles/prepositions).\nBy most measures, [Sardinian](https://bliptext.com/articles/sardinian-language) and Italian are the least divergent languages from Latin, while French has changed the most.\nHowever, all Romance languages are closer to each other than to [classical Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/classical-latin).\n\n## Vulgar Latin\nDocumentary evidence about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research is limited, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize.\nMany of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers, and more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome.\nIn Western Europe, Latin gradually replaced [Celtic](https://bliptext.com/articles/celtic-languages) and other [Italic languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/italic-languages), which were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin.\nCommonalities in syntax and vocabulary facilitated the adoption of Latin.\nTo some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the [Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/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.\nOther scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language.\nWith the rise of the Roman Empire, spoken Latin spread first throughout Italy and then through [southern](https://bliptext.com/articles/southern-europe), [western](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-europe), [central](https://bliptext.com/articles/central-europe), and [southeastern Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/southeastern-europe), and [northern Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/north-africa) along parts of [western](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-europe) Asia.\nLatin reached a stage when innovations became generalised around the sixth and seventh centuries.\nAfter that time and within two hundred years, it became a [dead language](https://bliptext.com/articles/language-death) since \"the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them.\"\nBy the eighth and ninth centuries Latin gave way to Romance.\n# [Length of the Roman rule and the Romance Languages | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Map///Length///of///Roman///Rule///Neo///Latin///Languages.jpg]\n# [Romance languages in Europe | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Latin///Europe.png]\n\n## Fall of the Western Roman Empire\nDuring the political [decline of the Western Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/fall-of-the-western-roman-empire) in the fifth century, there were large-scale [migrations](https://bliptext.com/articles/migration-period) into the empire, and the Latin-speaking world was fragmented into several independent states.\nCentral Europe and the [Balkans](https://bliptext.com/articles/balkans) were occupied by Germanic and [Slavic](https://bliptext.com/articles/slavs) tribes, as well as by [Huns](https://bliptext.com/articles/huns).\n[British](https://bliptext.com/articles/british-latin) and [African Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/african-romance)—the forms of Vulgar Latin used in [Britain](https://bliptext.com/articles/roman-britain) and [the Roman province of Africa](https://bliptext.com/articles/africa-roman-province), where it had been spoken by much of the urban population—disappeared in the Middle Ages (as did [Moselle Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/moselle-romance) in Germany).\nBut the Germanic tribes that had penetrated [Roman Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/roman-italy), [Gaul](https://bliptext.com/articles/gaul), and [Hispania](https://bliptext.com/articles/hispania) eventually adopted Latin/Romance and the remnants of the [culture of ancient Rome](https://bliptext.com/articles/culture-of-ancient-rome) alongside existing inhabitants of those regions, and so Latin remained the dominant language there.\nIn part due to regional dialects of the Latin language and local environments, several languages evolved from it.\n\n## Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire\nMeanwhile, large-scale [migrations](https://bliptext.com/articles/migration-period) into the Eastern [Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/roman-empire) started with the [Goths](https://bliptext.com/articles/goths) and continued with [Huns](https://bliptext.com/articles/huns), [Avars](https://bliptext.com/articles/pannonian-avars), [Bulgars](https://bliptext.com/articles/bulgars), [Slavs](https://bliptext.com/articles/slavs), [Pechenegs](https://bliptext.com/articles/pechenegs), [Hungarians](https://bliptext.com/articles/hungarians) and [Cumans](https://bliptext.com/articles/cumans).\nThe invasions of [Slavs](https://bliptext.com/articles/slavs) were the most thoroughgoing, and they partially reduced the Romanic element in the [Balkans](https://bliptext.com/articles/balkans).\nThe invasion of the [Turks](https://bliptext.com/articles/ottoman-empire) and conquest of [Constantinople](https://bliptext.com/articles/constantinople) in 1453 marked the end of the empire.\nThe surviving local Romance languages were [Dalmatian](https://bliptext.com/articles/dalmatian-language) and [Common Romanian](https://bliptext.com/articles/common-romanian).\n\n## Early Romance\nOver the course of the fourth to eighth centuries, local changes in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon accumulated to the point that the speech of any locale was noticeably different from that of another.\nIn principle, differences between any two [lects](https://bliptext.com/articles/variety-linguistics) increased the more they were separated geographically, reducing easy mutual intelligibility between speakers of distant communities.\nClear evidence of some levels of change is found in the [Reichenau Glosses](https://bliptext.com/articles/reichenau-glosses), an eighth-century compilation of about 1,200 words from the fourth-century [Vulgate](https://bliptext.com/articles/vulgate) of [Jerome](https://bliptext.com/articles/jerome) that had changed in phonological form or were no longer normally used, along with their eighth-century equivalents in proto-[Franco-Provençal](https://bliptext.com/articles/franco-proven-al-language).\nThe following are some examples with reflexes in several modern Romance languages for comparison:\nIn 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](https://bliptext.com/articles/classical-latin) of c. 50 BC. It is likely that some of these words had already disappeared from casual speech by the time of the Glosses; but if so, they may well have been still widely understood, as there is no recorded evidence that the common people of the time had difficulty understanding the language.\nBy the 8th century, the situation was very different.\nDuring the late 8th century, [Charlemagne](https://bliptext.com/articles/charlemagne), holding that \"Latin of his age was by classical standards intolerably corrupt\", successfully imposed [Classical Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/classical-latin) as an artificial written vernacular for [Western Europe](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-europe).\nUnfortunately, this meant that parishioners could no longer understand the sermons of their priests, forcing the [Council of Tours in 813](https://bliptext.com/articles/council-of-tours-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.\nBy this time, and possibly as early as the 6th century according to Price (1984), the Romance [lects](https://bliptext.com/articles/variety-linguistics) had split apart enough to be able to speak of separate [Gallo-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/gallo-romance-languages), [Ibero-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/iberian-romance-languages), [Italo-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/italo-dalmatian-languages) and [Eastern Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/eastern-romance-languages).\nSome researchers have postulated that the major divergences in the spoken dialects began or accelerated considerably in the 5th century, as the formerly widespread and efficient communication networks of the [Western Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-roman-empire) rapidly broke down, leading to the total disappearance of the [Western Roman Empire](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-roman-empire) by the end of the century.\nDuring the period between the 5th–10th centuries AD Romance vernaculars documentation is scarce as the normal writing language used was [Medieval Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/medieval-latin), with vernacular writing only beginning in earnest in the 11th or 12th century.\nThe earliest such texts are the [Indovinello Veronese](https://bliptext.com/articles/indovinello-veronese) from the eight century and the [Oaths of Strasbourg](https://bliptext.com/articles/oaths-of-strasbourg) from the second half of the ninth century.\n\n## Recognition of the vernaculars\nFrom the 10th century onwards, some local [vernaculars](https://bliptext.com/articles/vernacular) developed a written form and began to supplant Latin in many of its roles.\nIn some countries, such as [Portugal](https://bliptext.com/articles/portugal), this transition was expedited by force of law; whereas in others, such as [Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/italy), many prominent poets and writers used the vernacular of their own accord – some of the most famous in [Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/italy) being [Giacomo da Lentini](https://bliptext.com/articles/giacomo-da-lentini) and [Dante Alighieri](https://bliptext.com/articles/dante-alighieri).\nWell before that, the vernacular was also used for practical purposes, such as the testimonies in the [Placiti Cassinesi](https://bliptext.com/articles/placiti-cassinesi), written 960–963.\n# [Romance – Germanic language border: \n• Early Middle Ages \n• Early Twentieth Century | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Germanic///%E2%80%93///Romance///language///border///map///%28early///Middle///Ages///%E2%80%93///early///twentieth///century%29.svg]\n\n## Uniformization and standardization\nThe invention of the [printing press](https://bliptext.com/articles/printing-press) brought a tendency towards greater uniformity of [standard languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/standard-language) within political boundaries, at the expense of other Romance languages and [dialects](https://bliptext.com/articles/dialect) less favored politically.\nIn France, for instance, the dialect spoken in the region of Paris gradually spread to the entire country, and the [Occitan](https://bliptext.com/articles/occitan-language) of the south lost ground.\n\n# Samples\nLexical and grammatical similarities among the Romance languages, and between Latin and each of them, are apparent from the following examples in various Romance [lects](https://bliptext.com/articles/variety-linguistics), all meaning 'She always closes the window before she dines/before dining'.\nElla cerra sempre la ventana antes de cenar.\nCentro Cadore: La sera sempre la fenestra gnante de disna.\nAuronzo di Cadore: La sera sempro la fenestra davoi de disnà.\nGherdëina: Ëila stluj for l viere dan maië da cëina.\n(Bergamasque)]] || (Lé) la sèra sèmper sö la finèstra prima de senà.\nSome of the divergence comes from [semantic change](https://bliptext.com/articles/semantic-change): where the same root words have developed different meanings.\nFor example, the Portuguese word fresta is descended from Latin fenestra \"window\" (and is thus [cognate](https://bliptext.com/articles/cognate) to French fenêtre, Italian finestra, Romanian fereastră and so on), but now means \"skylight\" and \"slit\".\nCognates may exist but have become rare, such as hiniestra in Spanish, or dropped out of use entirely.\nThe Spanish and Portuguese terms defenestrar meaning \"to [throw through a window](https://bliptext.com/articles/defenestration)\" and fenestrado meaning \"replete with windows\" also have the same root, but are later borrowings from Latin.\nLikewise, 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.\nGalician has both fiestra (from medieval fẽestra, the ancestor of standard Portuguese fresta) and the less frequently used ventá and xanela.\nAs 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.\nSpanish, 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\".\nSardinian 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).\n\n# Classification and related languages\nAlong with Latin and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, the Romance languages make up the [Italic branch](https://bliptext.com/articles/italic-languages) of the [Indo-European family](https://bliptext.com/articles/indo-european-languages).\nIdentifying subdivisions of the Romance languages is inherently problematic, because most of the linguistic area is a [dialect continuum](https://bliptext.com/articles/dialect-continuum), and in some cases political biases can come into play.\nA tree model is often used, but the selection of criteria results in different trees.\nMost classification schemes are, implicitly or not, historical and geographic, resulting in groupings such as [Ibero-](https://bliptext.com/articles/iberian-romance-languages) and [Gallo-Romance](https://bliptext.com/articles/gallo-romance-languages).\nA major division can be drawn between Eastern and Western Romance, separated by the [La Spezia-Rimini line](https://bliptext.com/articles/la-spezia-rimini-line).\nThe main subfamilies that have been proposed by [Ethnologue](https://bliptext.com/articles/ethnologue) within the various classification schemes for Romance languages are:\n# [Romance languages and dialects | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Idiomas///y///dialectos///romances.png]\n\n## Ranking by distance\nAnother approach involves attempts to rank the distance of Romance languages from each other or from their common ancestor (i.e. ranking languages based on how [conservative or innovative](https://bliptext.com/articles/conservative-and-innovative-language) they are, although the same language may be conservative in some respects while innovative in others).\nBy most measures, French is the most highly differentiated Romance language, although Romanian has changed the greatest amount of its vocabulary, while Italian and Sardinian have changed the least.\nStandard Italian can be considered a \"central\" language, which is generally somewhat easy to understand to speakers of other Romance languages, whereas French and Romanian are peripheral and quite dissimilar from the rest of Romance.\n\n## Pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages\nSome Romance languages have developed varieties which seem dramatically restructured as to their grammars or to be mixtures with other languages.\nThere are several dozens of creoles of [French](https://bliptext.com/articles/french-based-creole-languages), [Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/spanish-based-creole-languages), and [Portuguese](https://bliptext.com/articles/portuguese-based-creole-languages) origin, some of them spoken as [national languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/national-language) and lingua franca in former European colonies.\n**Creoles of French:**\n**Creoles of Spanish:**\n**Creoles of Portuguese:**\n\n## Auxiliary and constructed languages\nLatin and the Romance languages have also served as the inspiration and basis of numerous auxiliary and constructed languages, so-called \"Neo-Romance languages\".\nThe concept was first developed in 1903 by Italian mathematician [Giuseppe Peano](https://bliptext.com/articles/giuseppe-peano), under the title [Latino sine flexione](https://bliptext.com/articles/latino-sine-flexione).\nHe wanted to create a naturalistic international language, as opposed to an autonomous constructed language like [Esperanto](https://bliptext.com/articles/esperanto) or [Volapük](https://bliptext.com/articles/volap-k) which were designed for maximal simplicity of lexicon and derivation of words.\nPeano used Latin as the base of his language because, as he described it, Latin had been the international scientific language until the end of the 18th century.\nOther languages developed include [Idiom Neutral](https://bliptext.com/articles/idiom-neutral) (1902), [Interlingue](https://bliptext.com/articles/interlingue)-Occidental (1922), [Interlingua](https://bliptext.com/articles/interlingua) (1951) and [Lingua Franca Nova](https://bliptext.com/articles/lingua-franca-nova) (1998).\nThe most famous and successful of these is Interlingua.\nEach of these languages has attempted to varying degrees to achieve a pseudo-Latin vocabulary as common as possible to living Romance languages.\nSome languages have been constructed specifically for communication among speakers of Romance languages, the [Pan-Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/pan-romance-language).\nThere are also languages created for artistic purposes only, such as [Talossan](https://bliptext.com/articles/talossa).\nBecause 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.\nThese include [Brithenig](https://bliptext.com/articles/brithenig) (which mirrors [Welsh](https://bliptext.com/articles/welsh-language)), Breathanach (mirrors [Irish](https://bliptext.com/articles/irish-language)), [Wenedyk](https://bliptext.com/articles/wenedyk) (mirrors [Polish](https://bliptext.com/articles/polish-language)), Þrjótrunn (mirrors [Icelandic](https://bliptext.com/articles/icelandic-language)), and Helvetian (mirrors [German](https://bliptext.com/articles/german-language)).\n\n# Sound changes\n\n## Consonants\nSignificant [sound changes](https://bliptext.com/articles/sound-change) affected the consonants of the Romance languages.\n\n### Apocope\nThere was a tendency to eliminate final consonants in Vulgar Latin, either by dropping them ([apocope](https://bliptext.com/articles/apocope)) or adding a vowel after them ([epenthesis](https://bliptext.com/articles/epenthesis)).\nMany 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\").\nMany 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).\nFinal -m was dropped in Vulgar Latin.\nEven in [Classical Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/classical-latin), final -am, -em, -um ([inflectional suffixes](https://bliptext.com/articles/suffix) of the [accusative case](https://bliptext.com/articles/accusative-case)) were often [elided](https://bliptext.com/articles/elision) in [poetic meter](https://bliptext.com/articles/meter-poetry), suggesting the m was weakly pronounced, probably marking the [nasalisation](https://bliptext.com/articles/nasal-vowel) of the vowel before it.\nThis nasal vowel lost its nasalization in the Romance languages except in monosyllables, where it became e.g. Spanish quien *, whereas Spanish disyllabic mío and Portuguese and Catalan monosyllabic meu are derived from disyllabic > *.\nAs a result, only the following final consonants occurred in Vulgar Latin:\nFinal -t was eventually lost in many languages, although this often occurred several centuries after the Vulgar Latin period.\nFor example, the reflex of -t was dropped in [Old French](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-french) and [Old Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-spanish) only around 1100.\nIn Old French, this occurred only when a vowel still preceded the t (generally Old French aime but venit \"he comes\" > Old French vient: the was never dropped and survives into Modern French in [liaison](https://bliptext.com/articles/liaison-french), e.g. vient-il?\n\"is he coming?\"\n(the corresponding in aime-t-il? is analogical, not inherited).\nOld French also kept the third-person plural ending -nt intact.\nIn Italo-Romance and the [Eastern Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/eastern-romance-languages), eventually all final consonants were either lost or protected by an epenthetic vowel, except for some articles and a few monosyllabic prepositions con, per, in.\nModern Standard Italian still has very few consonant-final words, although Romanian has resurfaced them through later loss of final and.\nFor example, amās \"you love\" > ame > Italian ami; amant \"they love\" > *aman > Ital.\namano.\nOn the evidence of \"sloppily written\" [Lombardic language](https://bliptext.com/articles/lombardic-language) documents, however, the loss of final in northern 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](https://bliptext.com/articles/syntactic-gemination) (raddoppiamento sintattico) that they trigger.\nIt is also thought that after a long vowel became rather than simply disappearing: nōs > noi \"we\", crās > crai \"tomorrow\" (southern Italy).\nIn unstressed syllables, the resulting diphthongs were simplified: canēs > * > cani \"dogs\"; amīcās > * > amiche \"(female) friends\", where nominative amīcae should produce **amice rather than amiche (note masculine amīcī > amici not *amichi).\nCentral [Western Romance languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/western-romance-languages) eventually regained a large number of final consonants through the general loss of final and, e.g. Catalan llet \"milk\" Old French froit > froid, feminine frīgidam > Old French froide > froide.\n\n### Palatalization\nIn Romance languages the term 'palatalization' is used to describe the phonetic evolution of velar stops preceding a front vowel and of consonant clusters involving yod or of the palatal approximant itself.\nThe process involving gestural blending and articulatory reinforcement, starting from Late Latin and Early Romance, generated a new series of consonants in Romance languages.\n\n### Lenition\n[Stop consonants](https://bliptext.com/articles/stop-consonant) shifted by [lenition](https://bliptext.com/articles/lenition) in Vulgar Latin in some areas.\nThe voiced [labial consonants](https://bliptext.com/articles/labial-consonant) and (represented by ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩, respectively) both developed a [fricative](https://bliptext.com/articles/voiced-bilabial-fricative) as an intervocalic allophone.\nThis 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.\nIn many Romance languages (Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.), this fricative later developed into a ; but in others (Spanish, Galician, some Catalan and Occitan dialects, etc.) reflexes of and simply merged into a single phoneme.\nSeveral 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.\nThe dividing line between the two sets of dialects is called the [La Spezia–Rimini Line](https://bliptext.com/articles/la-spezia-rimini-line) and is one of the most important [isogloss](https://bliptext.com/articles/isogloss) bundles of the Romance dialects.\nThe changes (instances of diachronic lenition resulting in [phonological restructuring](https://bliptext.com/articles/phonological-change)) are as follows:\nSingle voiceless plosives became [voiced](https://bliptext.com/articles/voice-phonetics): -p-, -t-, -c- > -b-, -d-, -g-.\nSubsequently, in some languages they were further weakened, either becoming [fricatives](https://bliptext.com/articles/fricative) or [approximants](https://bliptext.com/articles/approximant-consonant), (as in Spanish) or disappearing entirely (such as and lost between vowels in French, but > ).\nThe following example shows progressive weakening of original /t/: e.g. vītam > Italian vita, Portuguese vida (European Portuguese ), Spanish vida (Southern Peninsular Spanish ), and French vie.\nSome scholars have speculated that these sound changes may be due in part to the influence of [Continental Celtic languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/continental-celtic-languages), while scholarship of the past few decades has proposed internal motivations.\nThe sound /h/ was lost but later reintroduced into individual Romance languages.\nThe so-called h aspiré \"aspirated h\" in French, now completely silent, was a borrowing from [Frankish](https://bliptext.com/articles/frankish-language).\nIn Spanish, word-initial /f/ changed to /h/ during its [Medieval stage](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-spanish) and was lost afterwards (for example farina > harina).\nRomanian acquired it most likely from the adstrate.\n[Consonant length](https://bliptext.com/articles/geminate-consonant) is no longer phonemically distinctive in most Romance languages.\nHowever some [languages of Italy](https://bliptext.com/articles/languages-of-italy) (Italian, [Sardinian](https://bliptext.com/articles/sardinian-language), Sicilian, and numerous other varieties of central and southern Italy) do have long consonants like, etc., where the doubling indicates either actual length or, in the case of [plosives](https://bliptext.com/articles/plosive-consonants) and [affricates](https://bliptext.com/articles/affricate), a short hold before the consonant is released, in many cases with distinctive lexical value: e.g. note (notes) vs. notte (night), cade (s/he, it falls) vs. cadde (s/he, it fell), caro (dear, expensive) vs. carro (cart, car).\nThey may even occur at the beginning of words in [Romanesco](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanesco-dialect), Neapolitan, Sicilian and other southern varieties, and are occasionally indicated in writing, e.g. Sicilian cchiù (more), and ccà (here).\nIn general, the consonants, , and are long at the start of a word, while the [archiphoneme](https://bliptext.com/articles/archiphoneme) is realised as a [trill](https://bliptext.com/articles/trill-consonant) in the same position.\nIn much of central and southern Italy, the affricates /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ weaken synchronically to fricative [ʃ] and [ʒ] between vowels, while their geminate congeners do not, e.g. cacio (cheese) vs. caccio (I chase).\nIn Italian the geminates /ʃʃ/, /ɲɲ/, and /ʎʎ/ are pronounced as long [ʃʃ], [ɲɲ], and [ʎʎ] between vowels, but normally reduced to short following pause: lasciare 'let, leave' or la sciarpa 'the scarf' with [ʃʃ], but post-pausal sciarpa with [ʃ].\nA few languages have regained secondary geminate consonants.\nThe double consonants of [Piedmontese](https://bliptext.com/articles/piedmontese-language) exist only after stressed, written ë, and are not etymological: vëdde (Latin vidēre, to see), sëcca (Latin sicca, dry, feminine of sech).\nIn standard Catalan and Occitan, there exists a geminate sound 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.\n\n### Vowel prosthesis\nIn [Late Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/late-latin) a [prosthetic](https://bliptext.com/articles/prothesis-linguistics) vowel /i/ (lowered to /e/ in most languages) was inserted at the beginning of any word that began with (referred to as s impura) and a voiceless consonant (#sC- > isC-):\nWhile Western Romance words fused the prosthetic vowel with the word, cognates in Eastern Romance and southern Italo-Romance did not, e.g. Italian scrivere, spada, spirito, Stefano, and stato, Romanian scrie, spată, spirit, Ștefan and stat.\nIn Italian, syllabification rules were preserved instead by vowel-final articles, thus feminine spada as la spada, but instead of rendering the masculine *il stato, lo stato came to be the norm.\nThough receding at present, Italian once had a prosthetic maintaining /s/ syllable-final if a consonant preceded such clusters, so that 'in Switzerland' was in Svizzera.\nSome speakers still use the prothetic productively, and it is fossilized in a few set locutions such as in ispecie 'especially' or per iscritto 'in writing' (a form whose survival may have been buttressed in part by the word iscritto /VhC/ > (where V is any vowel and C any consonant).\nThis vowel length began to be lost in Early Modern French, but the long vowels are still usually marked with a circumflex (and continue to be distinguished regionally, chiefly in Belgium).\nA fourth vowel length system, still non-phonemic, has now arisen: All nasal vowels as well as the oral vowels (which mostly derive from former long vowels) are pronounced long in all stressed [closed syllables](https://bliptext.com/articles/closed-syllable), and all vowels are pronounced long in syllables closed by the voiced fricatives.\nThis system in turn has been phonemicized in some varieties (e.g. [Haitian Creole](https://bliptext.com/articles/haitian-creole)), as a result of the loss of final.\n\n### Latin diphthongs\nThe Latin diphthongs ae and oe, pronounced and in earlier Latin, were early on monophthongized.\nae became by the 1st century at the latest.\nAlthough this sound was still distinct from all existing vowels, the neutralization of Latin vowel length eventually caused its merger with French ciel, Spanish/Italian cielo, Portuguese céu, with the same vowel as in mele \"honey\" > French/Spanish miel, Italian miele, Portuguese mel.\nSome words show an early merger of ae with, as in praeda \"booty\" > *prēda > French proie (vs. expected **priée), Italian preda (not **prieda) \"prey\"; or faenum \"hay\" > *fēnum > Spanish heno, French foin (but Italian fieno /fjɛno/).\noe generally merged with : poenam \"punishment\" > Romance * > Spanish/Italian pena, French peine; foedus \"ugly\" > Romance * > Spanish feo, Portuguese feio.\nThere 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 ) and so oe was mostly limited to Greek loanwords, which were typically learned (high-register) terms.\nau merged with ō in the popular speech of Rome already by the 1st century.\nA number of authors remarked on this explicitly, e.g. [Cicero](https://bliptext.com/articles/cicero)'s taunt that the populist politician [Publius Clodius Pulcher](https://bliptext.com/articles/publius-clodius-pulcher) had changed his name from Claudius to ingratiate himself with the masses.\nThis 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.\nFor example, Italian and French have as the usual reflex, but this post-dates diphthongization of and the French-specific palatalization > (hence causa > French chose, Italian cosa not **cuosa).\nSpanish has, but Portuguese spelling maintains ⟨ou⟩, which has developed to (and still remains as in some dialects, and in others).\nOccitan, Dalmatian, Sardinian, and many other minority Romance languages still have while in Romanian it underwent diaresis like in aurum > aur (a-ur).\nA few common words, however, show an early merger with ō, evidently reflecting a generalization of the popular Roman pronunciation: e.g. French queue, Italian coda , Occitan co(d)a, Romanian coadă (all meaning \"tail\") must all derive from cōda rather than Classical cauda.\nSimilarly, Spanish oreja, 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 PWR */padzʲe/ (lenition) > OF paiz /pajts/; *punctum \"point\" > Gallo-Romance */ponʲto/ > */pojɲto/ (fronting) > OF point /põjnt/.\nDuring 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 > beaus.\nBy the end of the Middle French period, all falling diphthongs either monophthongized or switched to rising diphthongs: proto-OF > early OF > modern spelling ⟨ai ei i oi ui oi ui au eau eu i ou ou u⟩ > mod.\nFrench.\n\n#### Nasalization\nIn both French and Portuguese, [nasal vowels](https://bliptext.com/articles/nasal-vowel) eventually developed from sequences of a vowel followed by a nasal consonant (/m/ or /n/).\nOriginally, all vowels in both languages were nasalized before any nasal consonants, and nasal consonants not immediately followed by a vowel were eventually dropped.\nIn 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 > donne, fēminam > femme.\nOther vowels remained nasalized, and were dramatically lowered: fīnem \"end\" > fin (often pronounced ); linguam \"tongue\" > langue ; ūnum \"one\" > un.\nIn Portuguese, /n/ between vowels was dropped, and the resulting [hiatus](https://bliptext.com/articles/hiatus-linguistics) eliminated through vowel contraction of various sorts, often producing diphthongs: manum, *manōs > PWR *manu, ˈmanos \"hand(s)\" > mão, mãos ; canem, canēs \"dog(s)\" > PWR *kane, ˈkanes > *can, ˈcanes > cão, cães ; ratiōnem, ratiōnēs \"reason(s)\" > PWR *raˈdʲzʲone, raˈdʲzʲones > *raˈdzon, raˈdzones > razão, razões (Brazil), (Portugal).\nSometimes the nasalization was eliminated: lūna \"moon\" > Galician-Portuguese lũa > lua; vēna \"vein\" > Galician-Portuguese vẽa > veia.\nNasal vowels that remained actually tend to be raised (rather than lowered, as in French): fīnem \"end\" > fim ; centum \"hundred\" > PWR tʲsʲɛnto > cento ; pontem \"bridge\" > PWR pɔnte > ponte (Brazil), (Portugal).\nRomanian shows evidence of past nasalization phenomena, the loss of palatal nasal [ɲ] in vie /y/, e.g. lūnam > French lune, Occitan.\nMany of the languages in Switzerland and Italy show the further change /y/ > /i/.\nAlso very common is some variation of the French development (lengthened in [open syllables](https://bliptext.com/articles/open-syllable)) > >, with mid back vowels diphthongizing in some circumstances and then re-monophthongizing into mid-front rounded vowels.\n(French has both and, with developing from in certain circumstances.)\n\n## Unstressed vowels\nThere was more variability in the result of the unstressed vowels.\nOriginally 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.\nIn Italo-Western Romance, however, vowels in unstressed syllables were significantly different from stressed vowels, with yet a third outcome for final unstressed syllables.\nIn non-final unstressed syllables, the seven-vowel system of stressed syllables developed, but then the low-mid vowels merged into the high-mid vowels.\nThis system is still preserved, largely or completely, in all of the conservative Romance languages (e.g. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan).\nIn final unstressed syllables, results were somewhat complex.\nOne of the more difficult issues is the development of final short -u, which appears to have been raised to rather than lowered to, as happened in all other syllables.\nHowever, it is possible that in reality, final comes from long *-ū >, but -um > >.\nThe 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:\nVarious later changes happened in individual languages, e.g.:\n\n## Intertonic vowels\nThe so-called intertonic vowels are word-internal unstressed vowels, i.e. not in the initial, final, or tonic (i.e. stressed) syllable, hence intertonic.\nIntertonic vowels were the most subject to loss or modification.\nAlready 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.\nBut many languages ultimately dropped almost all intertonic vowels.\nGenerally, those languages south and east of the [La Spezia–Rimini Line](https://bliptext.com/articles/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/.\nStandard Italian generally maintained intertonic vowels, but typically raised unstressed /e/ > /i/.\nExamples:\nPortuguese is more conservative in maintaining some intertonic vowels other than /a/: e.g. *offerḗscere \"to offer\" > Portuguese oferecer vs. Spanish ofrecer, French offrir ( Spanish Esteban but Old French Estievne > French Étienne.\nMany cases of /a/ before the stress also ultimately dropped in French: sacraméntum \"sacrament\" > Old French sairement > French serment \"oath\".\n\n# Writing systems\nThe Romance languages for the most part have continued to use the Latin alphabet while adapting it to their evolution.\nOne exception was Romanian, where before the nineteenth century, the [Romanian Cyrillic alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-cyrillic-alphabet) was used due to Slavic influence after the Roman retreat.\nA Cyrillic alphabet was also used for Romanian (then called Moldovan) in the [USSR](https://bliptext.com/articles/soviet-union).\nThe non-Christian populations of Spain also used the scripts of their religions ([Arabic](https://bliptext.com/articles/arabic-script) and [Hebrew](https://bliptext.com/articles/hebrew-script)) to write Romance languages such as [Judaeo-Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/judaeo-spanish) and [Mozarabic](https://bliptext.com/articles/mozarabic-language) in [aljamiado](https://bliptext.com/articles/aljamiado).\n\n## Letters\nThe [classical Latin alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/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 – was [modified and augmented](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-script-alphabet) in various ways to yield the spelling systems of the Romance languages.\nIn particular, the single Latin letter V split into V (consonant) and U (vowel), and the letter I split into I and J.\nThe Latin letter K and the new letter W, which came to be widely used in [Germanic languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/germanic-languages), are seldom used in most Romance languages – mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words.\nIndeed, in Italian prose is properly.\nPortuguese and Catalan eschew importation of \"foreign\" letters more than most languages.\nThus Wikipedia is in Catalan but in Spanish; chikungunya, sandwich, kiwi are, , in Portuguese but , , in Spanish.\nWhile 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.\nSome letters, notably H and Q, have been variously combined in [digraphs](https://bliptext.com/articles/digraph-orthography) or [trigraphs](https://bliptext.com/articles/trigraph-orthography) (see below) to represent phonetic phenomena that could not be recorded with the basic Latin alphabet, or to get around previously established spelling conventions.\nMost languages added auxiliary marks ([diacritics](https://bliptext.com/articles/diacritic)) to some letters, for these and other purposes.\nThe spelling systems of most Romance languages are fairly simple, and consistent within any language.\nSpelling rules are typically [phonemic](https://bliptext.com/articles/phonemic-orthography) (as opposed to being strictly [phonetic](https://bliptext.com/articles/phonetic-transcription)); as a result of this, the actual pronunciation of standard written forms can vary substantially according to the speaker's accent (which may differ by region) or the position of a sound in the word or utterance ([allophony](https://bliptext.com/articles/allophone)).\nThe following letters have notably different values between languages, or between Latin and the Romance languages:\nOtherwise, letters that are not combined as digraphs generally represent the same phonemes as suggested by the [International Phonetic Alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/international-phonetic-alphabet) (IPA), whose design was, in fact, greatly influenced by Romance spelling systems.\n\n## Digraphs and trigraphs\nSince 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.\nThe 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\".\nThese were once [aspirated](https://bliptext.com/articles/aspiration-phonetics) sounds in Greek before changing to corresponding fricatives, and the H represented what sounded to the Romans like an following, , and respectively.\nSome of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:\nWhile 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.\nOnly French has kept these [etymological](https://bliptext.com/articles/etymology) spellings, which now represent or, , and , respectively.\n\n### Double consonants\n[Gemination](https://bliptext.com/articles/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.\nIn [Jèrriais](https://bliptext.com/articles/j-rriais), long consonants are marked with an apostrophe: s's is a long, ss's is a long , and t't is a long.\nThe phonemic contrast between geminate and single consonants is widespread in [Italian](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-language), and normally indicated in the traditional orthography: fatto 'done' vs. fato 'fate, destiny'; cadde 's/he, it fell' vs. cade 's/he, it falls'.\nThe double consonants in French orthography, however, are merely etymological.\nIn Catalan, the gemination of l is marked by a punt volat (\"flying point\"): l·l.\n\n## Diacritics\nRomance languages also introduced various marks ([diacritics](https://bliptext.com/articles/diacritic)) that may be attached to some letters, for various purposes.\nIn 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.\nDiacritics are also used to mark word stress, to indicate exceptional pronunciation of letters in certain words, and to distinguish words with same pronunciation ([homophones](https://bliptext.com/articles/homophone)).\nDepending on the language, some letter-diacritic combinations may be considered distinct letters, e.g. for the purposes of [lexical sorting](https://bliptext.com/articles/alphabetical-order).\nThis is the case, for example, of Romanian ș and Spanish ñ.\nThe following are the most common use of diacritics in Romance languages.\n\n## Upper and lowercase\nMost languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or \"[cases](https://bliptext.com/articles/letter-case)\" of the alphabet: [majuscule](https://bliptext.com/articles/letter-case) (\"uppercase\" or \"capital letters\"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and [minuscule](https://bliptext.com/articles/letter-case) (\"lowercase\"), derived from [Carolingian writing](https://bliptext.com/articles/carolingian-minuscule) and Medieval [quill pen](https://bliptext.com/articles/quill-pen) handwriting which were later adapted by printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.\nIn particular, all Romance languages capitalize (use uppercase for the first letter of) the following words: the first word of each complete [sentence](https://bliptext.com/articles/sentence-linguistics), most words in names of people, places, and organizations, and most words in titles of books.\nThe Romance languages do not follow the German practice of capitalizing all nouns including common ones.\nUnlike 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\").\nHowever, each language has some exceptions to this general rule.\n\n# Vocabulary comparison\nThe tables below provide a vocabulary comparison that illustrates a number of examples of sound shifts that have occurred between Latin and Romance languages.\nWords are given in their conventional spellings.\nIn addition, for French the actual pronunciation is given, due to the dramatic differences between spelling and pronunciation.\n(French spelling approximately reflects the pronunciation of [Old French](https://bliptext.com/articles/old-french), c. 1200 AD.)\n\n## Degrees of lexical similarity among the Romance languages\nData from [Ethnologue](https://bliptext.com/articles/ethnologue):","revisionCount":0},"hasMore":false,"nextCursor":null}