Romance languages

Romance
Geographic distribution:	Originally Southern Europe and parts of Africa; now also Latin America, Canada, parts of Lebanon and much of Western Africa
Linguistic classification:	Indo-European Italic Romance
Subdivisions:	Western Romance (or Italo-Western) Eastern Romance Sardinian
Romance languages in the world

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The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome. There are more than 800 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in Europe and the Americas, as well as many smaller regions scattered throughout the world. Because of the extreme difficulty and varying methodology of distinguishing among language, variety, and dialect, it is impossible to count the number of Romance languages now in existence, but a restrictive, arbitrary account can place the total at approximately 25. In fact, the number is much larger, and many more existed previously (SIL Ethnologue lists 47 Romance languages). Today the six most widely spoken standardized Romance languages are Spanish (c. 329 million native), Portuguese (c. 178 million native), French (c. 68 million native), Italian (c. 62 million native), Romanian (c. 23 million native), and Catalan (c. 12 million native)^[1]. Many of these languages have large numbers of non-native speakers; this is especially the case for French, in widespread use throughout West Africa as a lingua franca. Among numerous other Romance languages are Aragonese, Aromanian, Arpitan, Asturian, Corsican, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Friulian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese, Lombard, Mirandese, Neapolitan, Occitan, Piedmontese, Romansh, Sardinian, Sicilian, Venetian and Walloon.

1 Origins
2 Name
3 Samples
4 History
5 Modern status
6 Classification and related languages
7 Linguistic features
8 Sound changes
9 Writing systems
10 Vocabulary comparison
11 Bibliography
12 See also
13 References
14 External links

Origins

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

During the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and collapse in the 5th century, varieties of Latin began to diverge within each local area at an accelerated rate, and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. The overseas empires established by Portugal, Spain and France from the 15th century onward spread their languages to the other continents, to such an extent that about two-thirds of all Romance speakers today live outside Europe.

Despite profound influences (e.g. substratum from pre-Roman languages, especially Continental Celtic languages; and superstratum from later Germanic or Slavic invasions), the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of all Romance languages seem to be predominantly evolutions of Vulgar Latin. In particular, with only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the declension system of present Latin and as a result, have SVO sentence structure and make extensive use of prepositions.

Name

The term "Romance" comes from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice, derived from Romanicus: for instance, in the expression romanice loqui, "to speak in Roman" (that is, the Latin vernacular), contrasted with latine loqui, "to speak in Latin" (Medieval Latin, the conservative version of the language used in writing and formal contexts or as a lingua franca), and with barbarice loqui, "to speak in Barbarian" (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the Roman Empire).^[2] From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice, or "in the Roman vernacular".

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

Samples

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

English: She always closes the window before dining.

Latin	(illa) claudit semper fenestram antequam cēnat.
Aragonese	(Ella) zarra siempre a finestra antes de cenar.
Aromanian	(Ea/Nâsa) încljidi/nkidi totna firida ninti di tsinâ.
Asturian	(Ella) pieslla siempre la feniestra/ventana enantes de cenar.
Bergamasque	(Lé) la sèra sèmper sö la finèstra prima de senà.
Bolognese	(Lî) la sèra sänper la fnèstra prémma ed dsnèr.
Catalan	(Ella) tanca sempre la finestra abans de sopar.
Corsican	Edda chjudi sempri u balconu prima di cinà.
Emilian	(Lē) la sèra sèmpar sù la fnèstra prima ad snàr.
Extremaduran	(Ella) afecha siempri la ventana antis de cenal.
Franco-Provençal	(Le) sarre toltin/tojor la fenétra avan de goutâ/dinar/sopar.
French	Elle ferme toujours la fenêtre avant de dîner/souper.
Friulian	Jê e siere simpri il barcon prin di cenâ.
Galician	(Ela) pecha/fecha sempre a fiestra/xanela antes de cear.
Italian	(Ella/Lei) chiude sempre la finestra prima di cenare.
Judaeo-Spanish	Eya serra syempre la ventana antes de senar.
Ladin	(Ëra) stlüj dagnora la finestra impröma de cenè. (badiot) (Ëila) stluj for l viere dan maië da cëina (gherdëina)
Leonese	(Eilla) pecha siempre la ventana primeiru de cenare.
Ligurian	(Le) saera sempre u balcun primma de cenà.
Milanese	(Le) la sara semper sü la finestra prima de disnà.
Mirandese	(Eilha) cerra siempre la bentana/jinela atrás de jantar.
Mozarabic	Ella cloudet sempre la fainestra abante da cenare. (reconstructed)
Neapolitan	Essa nzerra sempe 'a fenesta primma 'e magnà.
Norman	Lli barre tréjous la crouésie devaunt de daîner.
Occitan	(Ela) barra sempre/totjorn la fenèstra abans de sopar.
Picard	Ale frunme tojours l’ creusèe édvint éd souper.
Piedmontese	Chila a sara sèmper la fnestra dnans ëd fé sin-a/dnans ëd siné.
Portuguese	Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de cear/jantar.
Romanian	(Ea) închide totdeauna fereastra înainte de a cina.^[3]
Romansh	Ella clauda/serra adina la fanestra avant ch'ella tschainia.
Sardinian	Issa serrat semper sa bentana innantis 'e chenare.
Sassarese	Edda sarra sempri lu balchoni primma di zinà.
Sicilian	Idda chiudi sempri la finestra avanti ca cena/pistia.
Spanish	(Ella) siempre cierra la ventana antes de cenar.
Umbrian	Essa chjude sempre la finestra prima de cena'.
Venetian	Eła ła sara/sera sempre ła fenestra vanti de xenàr/disnar.
Walloon	Ele sere todi li finiesse divant di soper.

Some of the lexical divergence above comes from semantic change: different Romance languages use the same root word with different meaning. Portuguese, for example, has the word fresta, and Spanish fenestra/finiestra (which is a cognate of French fenêtre, Italian finestra, Romanian fereastra and so on, from Latin "fenestra "window"), however it now means "skylight" and "slit" as opposed to "window." The Spanish and Portuguese terms defenestrar and defenestración/defenestração meaning "to throw through a window" or "defenestrate, defenestration", and fenestrado, "replete with windows", also have the same root (but are later derivations from Latin). Likewise, Portuguese also has the word cear, a cognate of Italian cenare and Spanish cenar, but uses it in the sense of "to have a late supper" in most varieties, while the preferred word for "to dine" is actually jantar (related to archaic Spanish yantar "to eat") because of semantic changes in the 19th century. Galician has both fiestra (from medieval fẽestra which is the ultimate origin of standard Portuguese fresta), and the less frequently used ventá and xanela.

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

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

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

History

Vulgar Latin

Main article: Vulgar Latin

There is a lack of documentary evidence about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalise upon. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples and forced resettlers, more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. It is believed that Vulgar Latin already had most of the features that are shared by all Romance languages, which distinguish them from Classical Latin, such as the almost complete loss of the Latin case system and its replacement by prepositions; the loss of the neuter gender, comparative inflections; replacement of some verb paradigms by innovations (e.g. the synthetic future gave way to an originally analytic strategy now typically formed by infinitive + evolved present indicative forms of 'have'); the use of articles; and the initial stages of the palatalization of the plosives /k/, /g/, and /t/. Some modern languages, such as Finnish, have similar, quite sharp, differences between their printed and spoken form. To some scholars, this suggests that the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire (from the end of 1st century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language.

Fall of the Western Roman Empire

During the political decline of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, there were large-scale migrations into the empire, and the Latin-speaking world was fragmented into several independent states. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by the Germanic and Slavic tribes, as well as by the Huns, which isolated the Vlachs from the rest of Latin Europe. British Romance and African Romance, the forms of Vulgar Latin used in southeastern Britain and the Roman province of Africa, where it had been spoken by much of the urban population, disappeared in the Middle Ages. But the Germanic tribes that had penetrated Italy, Gaul, and Hispania eventually adopted Latin and the remnants of Roman culture, and so Latin remained the dominant language there.

Latent incubation

Between the fifth and tenth centuries, the dialects of spoken Vulgar Latin diverged in various parts of their domain, eventually becoming distinct languages^{[citation needed]}. This evolution is poorly documented because the literary language, Medieval Latin, remained close to the older Classical Latin.

Recognition of the vernaculars

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

Uniformization and standardization

The invention of the printing press apparently slowed down the evolution of Romance languages from the 16th century on^{[citation needed]}, and brought a tendency towards greater uniformity of standard languages within political boundaries, at the expense of other Romance languages and dialects less favored politically. In France, for instance, the dialect spoken in the region of Paris gradually spread to the entire country, and the Occitan of the south lost ground.

Modern status

Main articles: Latin Europe, Romance-speaking Europe, Latin America, Latin Union, Romance-speaking Africa, and Romance-speaking Asia

Romance languages, 20th century

Number of native speakers of each Romance language, as fractions of the total 690 million

The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish (around 400 million speakers), followed by Portuguese (over 200 million), French (over 110 million), Italian (around 65 million), Romanian (around 24 million), and Catalan (around 12 million), all of which are official languages in at least one country. A few other languages have official status on a regional or otherwise limited level, for instance Friulian, Sardinian and Franco-Provençal in Italy; Romansh in Switzerland; and Galician in Spain. French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of the European Union. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan are the official languages of the Latin Union; and French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Outside Europe, French, Portuguese and Spanish are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that emerged from their respective colonial empires. French is one of the official languages of Canada, many countries in Africa, and some islands in the Indian and Pacific Ocean. It is also the sole official language of Quebec. Spanish is an official language of Mexico, much of South America, Central America, the islands of the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean (except in Haiti where the official languages are French and Haitian Kreyol, a French creole, and Jamaica, where English and Jamaican Patois are spoken.), and it is the official language of Equatorial Guinea in Africa and is the most spoken Romance language in the world. Portuguese is the official language of Brazil (reaching almost 190 million, it is the language spoken by half of population of South America that resides in Brazil), five African countries (Angola, Cabo Verde, Guiné-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé e Príncipe), and East Timor and Macau in Asia and is the second most spoken Romance language. Although Italy also had some colonial possessions, its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial domination, resulting in Italian being spoken only as a minority or secondary language by immigrant communities in North, South America, Australia, and African countries like Libya, Eritrea and Somalia. Romania did not establish a colonial empire, but the language is spoken as a native language in Moldova, while it also spread to other countries in rest of Europe, especially the other Romance countries (most notably Italy and Spain), and elsewhere such as Israel, where it is a native language to 5% of the population,^[4] and by many more as a secondary language; this is due to the large numbers of Romanian-born Jews who moved to Israel after World War II.^[5]

The total native speakers of Romance languages are divided as follows (with their ranking within the languages of the world in brackets):^[6]^[7]

Spanish (Hispanosphere) 47% (2nd)
Portuguese (Lusosphere) 26% (6th)
French (Francophonie) 11% (11th)
Italian 9% (18th)
Romanian 4% (34th)
Catalan (Països Catalans) 2% (75th)
Others 2%

Catalan is unusual in that it is not the main language of any nation-state, other than Andorra (a European microstate between Spain and France), but nonetheless has been able to compete and even gain speakers at the expense of the dominant language of its primary nation (Spanish); in fact, Catalan is probably the only minority European language whose long-term survival is not under threat. This is due to a strong belief that the Catalan language is a critical component of the ethnic identity of the Catalan people. This has allowed them to resist the assimilationist urges that are in the process of destroying most of the remaining minority-language communities, even those that have strong government support (e.g. Irish language speakers).

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

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, increased sensitivity to the rights of minorities have allowed some of these languages to start recovering their prestige and lost rights. Yet it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of minority Romance languages.

Classification and related languages

Eastern and Western Romance areas split by the La Spezia-Rimini Line

Main articles: Classification of Romance languages and List of Romance languages

The classification of the Romance languages is inherently difficult, since most of the linguistic area can be considered a dialect continuum, and in some cases political biases can come into play. Nevertheless, according to SIL counts, 47 Romance languages and dialects are spoken in Europe. Along with Latin (which is not included among the Romance languages) and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, they make up the Italic branch of the Indo-European family.

Continental Romance

Italo-Western Romance

Eastern Romance

Western Romance

Proto-Italian

Balkan Romance

Proto-Romanian

Albanian words

Occitan

Note that Dalmatian is now generally grouped under Proto-Italian rather than Eastern Romance^{[citation needed]}.

Proposed divisions

Extent of variation in development (very conservative to very innovatory)
Form ("to sing")	Latin	Nuorese Sardinian	Spanish	Brazilian Portuguese	Romanian	French
Infinitive	cantāre	[kanˈtare]	[kanˈtar]	[kɐ̃ˈtah]	[kɨnˈta(re)]	[ʃɑ̃ˈte]
Past Part.	cantātum	[kanˈtatu]	[kanˈtaðo]	[kɐ̃ˈtadu]	[kɨnˈtat]	[ʃɑ̃ˈte]
Gerund	cantandō	[kanˈtande]	[kanˈtando]	[kɐ̃ˈtɐ̃ndu]	[kɨnˈtɨnd]	[ʃɑ̃ˈtɑ̃]
1sg. indic.	cantō	[ˈkanto]	[ˈkanto]	[ˈkɐ̃tu]	[ˈkɨnt]	[ˈʃɑ̃t]
2sg. indic.	cantās	[ˈkantas]	[ˈkantas]	[ˈkɐ̃tɐs]	[ˈkɨntsʲ]	[ˈʃɑ̃t]
3sg. indic.	cantat	[ˈkantat]	[ˈkanta]	[ˈkɐ̃tɐ]	[ˈkɨntǝ]	[ˈʃɑ̃t]
1pl. indic.	cantāmus	[kanˈtamus]	[kanˈtamos]	[kɐ̃ˈtɐ̃mus]	[kɨnˈtǝm]	[ʃɑ̃ˈtɔ̃]
2pl. indic.	cantātis	[kanˈtates]	[kanˈtais]	[kɐ̃ˈtajs]	[kɨnˈtatsʲ]	[ʃɑ̃ˈte]
3pl. indic.	cantant	[ˈkantan]	[ˈkantan]	[ˈkɐ̃tɐ̃w̃]	[ˈkɨntǝ	[ˈʃɑ̃t]
1sg. subj.	cantem	[ˈkante]	[ˈkante]	[ˈkɐ̃tʃi]	[ˈkɨnt]	[ˈʃɑ̃t]
2sg. subj.	cantēs	[ˈkantes]	[ˈkantes]	[ˈkɐ̃tʃis]	[ˈkɨntsʲ]	[ˈʃɑ̃t]
3sg. subj.	cantet	[ˈkantet]	[ˈkante]	[ˈkɐ̃tʃi]	[ˈkɨnte]	[ˈʃɑ̃t]
1pl. subj.	cantēmus	[kanˈtemas]	[kanˈtemos]	[kɐ̃ˈtẽmus]	[kɨnˈtǝm]	[ʃɑ̃ˈtjɔ̃]
2pl. subj.	cantētis	[kanˈtetas]	[kanˈteis]	[kɐ̃ˈtejs]	[kɨnˈtatsʲ]	[ʃɑ̃ˈtje]
3pl. subj.	cantent	[ˈkanten]	[ˈkanten]	[ˈkɐ̃tẽj̃]	[ˈkɨnte]	[ˈʃɑ̃t]
2sg. impv.	cantā	[ˈkanta]	[ˈkanta]	[ˈkɐ̃tɐ]	[ˈkɨntǝ]	[ˈʃɑ̃t]
2pl. impv.	cantāte	[kanˈtate]	[kanˈtað]	[kɐ̃ˈtadʒi]	[kɨnˈtatsʲ]	[ʃɑ̃ˈte]

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

Italo-Western vs. Eastern vs. Southern. This is the scheme followed by Ethnologue, and is based primarily on the outcome of the ten monophthong vowels in Classical Latin. This is discussed more below.
West vs. East. This scheme divides the various languages along the La Spezia-Rimini Line, which runs across north-central Italy just to the north of the city of Florence (whose speech forms the basis of standard Italian). In this scheme, "East" includes the languages of central and southern Italy, and the Balkan Romance (or "Eastern Romance") languages in Romania, Greece, and elsewhere in the Balkans; "West" includes the languages of Portugal, Spain, France, northern Italy and Switzerland. Sardinian does not easily fit in this scheme.
"Conservative" vs. "innovatory". This is a non-genetic division whose precise boundaries are subject to debate. Generally, the Gallo-Romance languages (discussed further below) form the core "innovatory" languages, with standard French generally considered the most innovatory of all, while the languages near the periphery (which include Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian) are "conservative". Sardinian is generally acknowledged the most conservative Romance language, and was also the first language to split off genetically from the rest, possibly as early as the 1st century BC. Dante famously denigrated the Sardinians for the conservativeness of their speech, remarking that they imitate Latin "like monkeys imitate men".^[8]

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

Italo-Western, the largest group, which includes languages such as Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and French.
Eastern Romance, which includes the Romance languages of Eastern Europe, such as Romanian.
Southern Romance, which includes a few languages with particularly archaic features, such as Sardinian and, partially, Corsican. This family is thought to have included the now-vanished Romance languages of Africa (or at least, they appear to have evolved their vowels in the same way).

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

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

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

Lenition of intervocalic stops, which happens to the northwest but not to the southeast.
Degemination of geminate stops (producing new intervocalic voiceless stops, after the old ones were lenited), which again happens to the northwest but not to the southeast.
Deletion of intertonic vowels (between the stressed syllable and either the first or last syllable), again in the northwest but not the southeast.
Use of plurals in /s/ in the northwest vs. plurals using vowel change in the southeast.
Development of palatalized /k/ before /e,i/ to /(t)s/ in the northwest vs. /tʃ/ in the southeast.
Development of /kt/, which develops to /xt/ > /it/ (sometimes progressing further to /tʃ/) in the northwest but /tt/ in the southeast.

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

The Gallo‒Italic languages have vowel-changing plurals rather than /s/ plurals.
The Lombard language in north-central Italy and the Rhaeto-Romance languages have the "southeast" characteristic of /tʃ/ instead of /(t)s/ for palatalized /k/.
The Venetian language in northeast Italy and some of the Rhaeto-Romance languages have the "southeast" characteristic of developing /kt/ to /tt/.

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

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

Probably a more accurate description, however, would be to say that there was a focal point of innovation located in central France, from which a series of innovations spread out as areal changes. The La Spezia-Rimini Line represents the farthest point to the southeast that these innovations reached, corresponding to the northern chain of the Apennine Mountains, which cuts straight across northern Italy and forms a major geographic barrier to further language spread. This would explain why some of the "northwest" features (almost all of which can be characterized as innovations) end at differing points in northern Italy, and why some of the languages in geographically remote parts of Spain (in the south, and high in the Pyrenees) are lacking some of these features. It also explains why the languages in France (especially standard French) seem to have innovated earlier and more completely than other Western Romance languages.

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

Sardinian does not fit into this picture at all. It is clear that Sardinian became linguistically independent from the remainder of the Romance languages at an extremely early date, possibly already by the 1st century BC. Sardinian contains a large number of archaic features, including total lack of palatalization of /k/ and /g/ and a large amount of vocabulary preserved nowhere else, including some items already archaic by the time of Classical Latin (1st century BC). Sardinian has plurals in /s/ but no lenition of voiceless consonants (at least in most conservative Nuorese dialects) and a number of innovations unseen elsewhere: most famously, its unique vowel system, but also development of /au/ to /a/, a peculiar sort of lenition that operates as a synchronic feature, and use of su < ipsum as an article (another archaic feature, also seen in the Catalan of the Balearic Islands).

Gallo-Romance languages

Extensive reduction in French: sapūtum > su /sy/ "known"
Language	Change	Form	Pronun.
Vulgar Latin	--	saˈpūtum	/saˈpuːtũː/
Western Romance	vowel changes, first lenition		/saˈbuːdo/
Gallo-Romance	loss of final vowels		/saˈbuːt/
pre-French	second lenition, loss of length		/saˈvuθ/
	loss of /v/ near rounded vowel		/sǝˈuθ/
early Old French	fronting of /u/	seüṭ	/sǝˈyθ/
Old French	loss of dental fricatives	seü	/sǝˈy/
French	collapse of hiatus	su	/sy/

Extensive reduction in French: vītam > *vie* /vi/ "life"
Language	Change	Form	Pronun.
Vulgar Latin	--	vītam	/ˈviːtãː/
Western Romance	vowel changes, first lenition		/ˈviːda/
early Old French	second lenition, loss of length, final /a/ to /ǝ/	viḍe	/ˈviðǝ/
Old French	loss of dental fricatives	vie	/ˈviǝ/
French	loss of final schwa	vie	/vi/

Pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages

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

Creoles of French

Haitian Creole

Kweyol

Creoles of Spanish

Chavacano
Palenquero

Creoles of Portuguese

Kabuverdianu

Forro

Papiamento

Auxiliary and constructed languages

Main articles: Constructed language and International auxiliary language

Latin and the Romance languages have also served as the inspiration and basis of numerous auxiliary and constructed languages, such as Interlingua, its reformed version Modern Latin,^[10] Latino sine flexione, Occidental, and Lingua Franca Nova, as well as languages created for artistic purposes only, such as Talossan. Because Latin is a very well-attested ancient language, some amateur linguists have even constructed Romance languages that mirror real languages that developed from other ancestral languages. These include Brithenig (which mirrors Welsh), Breathanach^[11] (mirrors Irish), Wenedyk (mirrors Polish), Þrjótrunn (mirrors Icelandic),^[12] and Helvetian (mirrors German).^[13]

Linguistic features

Basic features

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

Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to words to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns. The amount of synthesis is significantly more than English, but less than Classical Latin and much less than the oldest Indo-European languages (e.g. Ancient Greek, Sanskrit). Inflection is fusional, with a single morpheme representing multiple features (as contrasted with agglutinative languages such as Turkish or Japanese). For example, Portuguese amei "I loved" is composed of am- "love" and the fusional morpheme -ei "first person, singular, preterite tense, indicative".
Romance languages have a fairly strict subject–verb–object word order, with predominant use of head-first (right-branching) constructions. Adjectives, genitives and relative clauses all follow their head noun, although (except in Romanian) determiners usually precede.
In general, nouns, adjectives and determiners inflect only according to grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) and grammatical number (singular or plural). Grammatical case is marked only on pronouns, as in English; case marking, as in English, is of the nominative–accusative type (rather than e.g. the ergative–absolutive marking of Basque or the split ergativity of Hindi). A significant exception, however, is Romanian, with two-case marking (nominative/accusative vs. genitive/dative) on nominal elements.
Verbs are inflected according to a complex morphology that marks person, number (singular or plural), tense, mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), and sometimes aspect and/or gender. Grammatical voice (active, passive, middle/reflexive) and some grammatical aspects (in particular, the perfect aspect) are expressed using periphrastic constructions.
Most Romance languages are null subject languages (but modern French is not, as a result of the phonetic decay of verb endings).
All Romance languages have two articles (definite and indefinite), and many have in addition a partitive article (expressing the concept of "some"). In some languages (notably, French), the use of an article with a noun is nearly obligatory; it serves to express grammatical number (no longer marked on most nouns) and to cope with the extreme homophony of French vocabulary as a result of extensive sound reductions.
The phonology of most Romance languages is of moderate size with few unusual phonemes. Phonemic vowel length is uncommon. Some languages have developed nasal vowels and/or front rounded vowels.
Word accent is of the stress (dynamic) type, rather than making use of pitch (as in Ancient Greek and some modern Slavic languages), and is free, occurring more or less unpredictably on one of the last three syllables. In practice, the stress is largely predictable, due to the many morphological and phonological stress-related patterns.

Changes from Classical Latin

Case system

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

The case system was drastically reduced from the vigorous six-case system of Latin. Although four cases can be constructed for Proto-Romance nouns (nominative, accusative, combined genitive/dative, and vocative), the vocative is marginal and present only in Romanian (where it may be an outright innovation), and of the remaining cases, no more than two are present in any one language. Romanian is the only modern Romance language with case marking on nouns, with a two-way opposition between nominative/accusative and genitive/dative. Some of the older Gallo-Romance languages (in particular, Old French, Old Occitan and Old Sursilvan) had an opposition between nominative and general oblique. The system of multiple noun declensions was also dramatically reduced; most modern languages have only three types (masculine -o, feminine -a, and an -e that can be either gender). As in English, case is preserved better on pronouns than elsewhere, with some pronouns marked for as many as four cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive) plus additional possessive and disjunctive forms.

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

The Romance languages developed grammatical articles where Latin had none. Articles are often introduced around the time a robust case system falls apart in order to disambiguate the remaining case markers (which are usually too ambiguous by themselves) and to serve as parsing clues that signal the presence of a noun (a function formerly served by the case endings themselves). This was the pattern followed by the Romance languages: In the Romance languages that still preserved a functioning nominal case system (e.g. Romanian and Old French), only the combination of article and case ending serves to uniquely identify number and case (compare the similar situation in modern German). All Romance languages have a definite article (originally developed from ipse "self" but replaced in nearly all languages by ille "that (over there)") and an indefinite article (developed from ūnus "one"). Many also have a partitive article (dē "of" + definite article).

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

Other changes

Loss of phonemic vowel length, and change into a free-stressed language. Classical Latin had an automatically determined stress on the second or third syllable from the end, conditioned by vowel length; once vowel length was neutralized, stress was no longer predictable so long as it remained where it was (which it mostly did).
Development of a series of palatal consonants as a result of palatalization.
Loss of most traces of the neuter gender.
Development of a series of analytic perfect tenses, comparable to English "I have done, I had done, I will have done".
Loss of the Latin synthetic passive voice, replaced by an analytic construction comparable to English "it is/was done".
Loss of deponent verbs, replaced by active-voice verbs.
Replacement of the Latin future tense with a new tense formed (usually) by a periphrasis of infinitive + present tense of habēre "have", which usually contracts into a new synthetic tense. A corresponding conditional tense is formed in the same way but using one of the past-tense forms of habēre.
Numerous lexical changes. A number of words were borrowed from the Germanic languages and Celtic languages. Many basic nouns and verbs, especially those that were short and/or had irregular morphology, were replaced by longer derived forms with regular morphology. Throughout the medieval period, words were borrowed from Classical Latin in their original form (learned words) or in something approaching the original form (semi-learned words), often replacing the popular forms of the same words.

Phonology

Vowels

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

Most languages have at least five monophthongs /a e i o u/. The parent language of most of the Italo-Western Romance languages (which includes the vast majority) actually had a seven-vowel system /a ɛ e i ɔ o u/, which is kept in most Italo-Western languages. In some languages, like Spanish and Romanian, the phonemic status and difference between open-mid and close-mid vowels was lost. French has probably the largest inventory of monophthongs, with conservative varieties having 12 oral vowels /a ɑ ɛ e i ɔ o u œ ø y ǝ/ ^[14] and 4 nasal vowels /ɑ̃ ɛ̃ ɔ̃ œ̃/. European Portuguese also has a large inventory, with 9 oral monophthongs /a ɐ ɛ e i ɔ o u ɨ/, 5 nasal monophthongs /ɐ̃ ẽ ĩ õ ũ/, and a large number of oral and nasal diphthongs (see below). (The phonemic status of /ɐ ɨ/ is somewhat doubtful, however, and neither phoneme exists in Brazilian Portuguese).^[15]
Some languages have a large inventory of falling diphthongs. These may or may not be considered as phonemic units (rather than sequences of vowel+glide), depending on their behavior. As an example, French, Spanish and Italian have occasional instances of putative falling diphthongs formed from a vowel plus a non syllabic /i/ or /u/ (e.g. Spanish veinte [ˈbeinte] "twenty", deuda [ˈdeuða] "debt"; French paille /paj/ "straw", caoutchouc /kawˈtʃu/ "rubber"; Italian lui /ˈlui/ "he", potei /poˈtei/ "I could"), but these are normally analyzed as sequences of vowel and glide. The diphthongs in Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan and Occitan, however, have various properties suggesting that they are better analyzed as unit phonemes. Portuguese, for example, has the diphthongs /aj ɐj ɛj ej ɔj oj uj aw ɛw ew iw (ow)/, where /ow/ (and to a lesser extent /ej/) appear only in some dialects. All except /aw ɛw/ appear frequently in verb and/or noun inflections. (Portuguese also has nasal diphthongs; see below.)
Among the major Romance languages, Portuguese and French have nasal vowel phonemes, stemming from nasalization before a nasal consonant followed by loss of the consonant (this occurred especially when the nasal consonant was not directly followed by a vowel). Originally, vowels in both languages were nasalized before all nasal consonants, but have subsequently become denasalized before nasal consonants that still remain (except in Brazilian Portuguese, where the pre-nasal vowels in words such as cama "bed", menos "less" remain highly nasalized). In Portuguese, nasal vowels are sometimes analyzed as phonemic sequences of oral vowels plus an underlying nasal consonant, but such an analysis is difficult in French because of the existence of minimal pairs such as bon /bɔ̃/ "good (masc.)", bonne /bɔn/ "good (fem.)". In both languages, there are fewer nasal than oral vowels. Nasalization triggered vowel lowering in French, producing the 4 nasal vowels /ɑ̃ ɛ̃ ɔ̃ œ̃/ (although most speakers nowadays pronounce /œ̃/ as /ɛ̃/). Vowel raising was triggered in Portuguese, however, producing the 5 nasal vowels /ɐ̃ ẽ ĩ õ ũ/. Vowel contraction and other changes also resulted in the Portuguese nasal diphthongs /ɐ̃w̃ ɐ̃j̃ ẽj̃ õj̃ ũj̃/ (of which /ũj̃/ occurs in only one word, muito /mũj̃tu/ "much, many, very", and [ẽj̃] is actually a final-syllable allophone of /ẽ/).
Most languages have fewer vowels in unstressed syllables than stressed syllables. This again reflects the Italo-Western Romance parent language, which had a seven-vowel system in stressed syllables (as described above) but only /a e i o u/ (with no low-mid vowels) in unstressed syllables. Some languages have seen further reductions: e.g. Standard Catalan has only [ǝ i u] in unstressed syllables. French, on the other hand, now allows all 12 of its phonemic vowels to occur either stressed or unstressed.
Most languages have even fewer vowels in final unstressed syllables than elsewhere. For example, the early stages of most Western Romance languages allowed only /a e o/. Some of these languages now allow more: Spanish, for example, now allows all five of its vowels to occur in final unstressed syllables, but /i u/ only occur in a few borrowed words, e.g. tribu "tribe", taxi "taxi". The Gallo-Romance languages went even farther, merging final /e o/, and French has carried things to the logical extreme by deleting all post-stressed vowels and uniformly placing the stress on the final syllable (except for a more-or-less non-phonemic final unstressed [ǝ] that occasionally appears).
Phonemic vowel length is uncommon. Vulgar Latin lost the phonemic vowel length of Classical Latin and replaced it with a non-phonemic length system where stressed vowels in open syllables were long, and all other vowels were short. Standard Italian still maintains this system, and it was rephonemicized in the Gallo-Romance languages (including the Rhaeto-Romance languages) as a result of the deletion of many final vowels. Some northern Italian languages (e.g. Friulan) still maintain this secondary phonemic length, but in most languages the new long vowels were either diphthongized or shortened again, in the process eliminating phonemic length. French is again the odd man out: Although it followed a normal Gallo-Romance path by diphthongizing five of the seven long vowels and shortening the remaining two, it phonemicized a third vowel length system around 1300 AD in syllables formerly closed with an /s/ (still marked with a circumflex accent), and now is in the process of phonemicizing a fourth system as a result of lengthening before final voiced fricatives.

Consonants

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

Key:

bold: Appears in all 5 languages.
italic: Appears in 3-4 languages.
(paren): Appears in 2 languages.
((double paren)): Appears in only 1 language.

Notable changes:

Spanish has no voiced fricatives. The equivalent of /v/ merged with /b/, and all the rest became voiceless. Spanish also lost /ʃ/, which became /x/.
The western languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese) all used to have the affricates /ts/, /dz/, /tʃ/, /dʒ/. By the 14th century or so, these all turned into fricatives except for Spanish /tʃ/ (Spanish /ts/ ended up becoming /θ/, at least in Northern and Central Spain; elsewhere, it merged with /s/, as in the other languages.) Romanian /dz/ likewise became /z/.
French, and recently Spanish, have lost /ʎ/ (which merged with /j/). Romanian merged /ʎ/ and /ɲ/ into /j/.

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

Although all of the languages had or used to have /tʃ/, almost none of these sounds are cognate between pairs of languages. The only real exception is many /tʃ/ between Italian and Romanian, stemming from Latin C- before E or I. Italian also has /tʃ/ brom Vulgar Latin -CY- and supported -TY- (elsewhere /ts/). Former French /tʃ/ is from initial or supported Latin C- before A; Spanish /tʃ/ is from Latin -CT-; former Portuguese /tʃ/ is from initial or supported Latin PL, CL, FL.
Italian and former Romanian /dz/ (from some instances of Vulgar Latin -DY-) are not cognate with former western /dz/ (from lenition of /ts/).

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

Lexical stress

Word stress was rigorously predictable in classical Latin, either on the penultimate syllable (second from last) or antepenultimate syllable (third from last), according to the syllable weight of the penultimate syllable. This is no longer the case in most Romance languages, and stress differences can be enough to distinguish between words. For example, Italian Papa [ˈpa.pa] (Pope) and papà [pa.ˈpa] (daddy), or the Spanish imperfect subjunctive cantara ([if he] sang) and future cantará ([he] will sing). However, the main function of Romance stress appears to be a clue for speech segmentation — namely to help the listener identify the word boundaries in normal speech, where inter-word spaces are usually absent.^{[citation needed]}

The position of the stressed syllable in a word generally varies from word to word in each Romance language. Stress usually remains fixed on its assigned syllable within any language, however, even as the word is inflected. It is usually restricted to one of the last three syllables in the word, although Italian verb forms can violate this, e.g. telefonano [teˈlɛ.fo.na.no] (they telephone). The limit may be exceeded also by verbs with attached clitics, provided the clitics are counted as part of the word; e.g. Spanish entregándomelo [en.tre.ˈɣan.do.me.lo] (delivering it to me), Italian mettiamocene [meˈtːjaː.mo.tʃe.ne] (let's put some of it in there), or Portuguese dávamo-vo-lo [ˈda.vɐ.mu.vu.lu] (we were giving it to you).

Stress in the Romance Languages mostly remains on the same syllable as in Latin, but various sound changes have made it no longer so predictable. Still, stress patterns are usually similar across languages, and usually in the penultimate syllable, because in most cases of former antepenultimate stress, the unstressed penultimate syllable was deleted. In its modern form French is the noticeable exception in that stress falls predictably on the last syllable that does not contain a schwa. It should be observed, however, that the final stress of Modern French is not the result of systematic stress shift, but of the phonological erosion of syllables following the Proto-Romance stressed syllable; thus while e.g. Italian transparently maintains Latin stress on the second syllable of an infinitive such as amare /aˈmare/, in fact French does, too: aimer /ɛˈme/, replicating at first Spanish /aˈmar/, but going beyond in losing /r/ as well.

Nominal Morphology

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

Number

The Romance languages inherited from Latin two grammatical numbers, singular and plural; there is no trace of a dual number.

Gender

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

Although Latin had a third gender (neuter), there is little trace of this in most languages. The biggest exception is Romanian, where there is a productive class of "neuter" nouns, which include the descendants of many Latin neuter nouns and which behave like masculines in the singular and feminines in the plural, both in the endings used and in the agreement of adjectives and pronouns (e.g. un deget "one finger" vs. două degete "two fingers", cf. Latin digitum, pl. digita). Such nouns arose because of the identity of the Latin neuter singular -um with the masculine singular, and the identity of the Latin neuter plural -a with the feminine singular. A similar class exists in Italian, although it is no longer productive (e.g. il dito "the finger" vs. le dita "the fingers", l'uovo "the egg" vs. le uova "the eggs"). (A few isolated nouns in Latin had different genders in the singular and plural, but this was an unrelated phenomen; this is similarly the case with a few French nouns, such as amour, délice, orgue.)

Case

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

Spanish pronoun inflections
Case	"I"	"you" (familiar sg.)	"oneself"	"he"	"she"	"we"
Nominative	yo	tú	—	él	ella	nosotros
Accusative	me	te	se	lo	la	nos
Dative	me	te	se	le	le	nos
Genitive	mío	tuyo	suyo	suyo; de él	suyo; de ella	nuestro
Possessive	mi	tu	su	su	su	nuestro
Disjunctive	mí	ti	sí	él	ella	nosotros
With con	conmigo	contigo	consigo	con él	con élla	con nosotros (archaic connosco)

In all Romance languages, this system was drastically reduced. In most modern Romance languages, in fact, case is no longer marked at all on nouns, adjectives and determiners, and most forms are derived from the Latin accusative case. Much like English, however, case has survived somewhat better on pronouns. Most pronouns have distinct nominative, accusative, genitive and possessive forms (cf. English "I, me, mine, my"). Many also have a separate dative form, a disjunctive form used after prepositions, and (in some languages) a special form used with the preposition con "with" (a conservative feature inherited from Latin forms such as mēcum, tēcum, nobiscum).

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

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

The same system underlines many other modern Romance languages, such as Portuguese, French and Catalan. In these languages, however, further sound changes have resulted in various irregularities. In Portuguese, for example, loss of /l/ and /n/ between vowels (with nasalization in the latter case) produces various irregular plurals (nação – nações "nation(s)"; hotel – hotéis "hotel(s)"). In French and Catalan, loss of /o/ and /e/ in most unstressed final syllables has caused the -os and -es classes to merge. In French, merger of remaining /e/ with final /a/ into [ǝ], and its subsequent loss, has completely obscured the original Romance system, and loss of final /s/ has caused most nouns to have identical pronunciation in singular and plural, although they are still marked differently in spelling (e.g. femme – femmes "woman – women", both pronounced /fam/).

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

Noun inflection has survived in Romanian somewhat better than elsewhere. Determiners are still marked for two cases (nominative/accusative and genitive/dative) in both singular and plural, and feminine singular nouns have separate endings for the two cases. In addition, there is a separate vocative case, and the combination of noun with a following clitic definite article produces a separate set of "definite" inflections for nouns.

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

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

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

A different type of noun inflection survived into the medieval period in a number of western Romance languages (Old French, Old Occitan, and the older forms of a number of Rhaeto-Romance languages). This inflection distinguished nominative from oblique, with the accusative case grouped with the oblique rather than the nominative, as in Romanian. The oblique case in these languages generally inherits from the Latin accusative; as a result, masculine nouns have distinct endings in the two cases while most feminine nouns don't.

A number of different inflectional classes are still represented at this stage. For example, the difference in the nominative case between masculine li voisins "the neighbor" and li pere "the father", and feminine la riens "the thing" vs. la fame "the woman", faithfully reflects the corresponding Latin inflectional differences (vicīnus vs. pater, fēmina vs. rēs). A number of synchronically quite irregular differences between nominative and oblique reflect direct inheritances of Latin third-declension nouns with two different stems (one for the nominative singular, one for all other forms), most with of which had a stress shift between nominative and the other forms: li ber – le baron "baron" (barō – barōnem); la suer – la seror "sister" (soror – sorōrem); li prestre – le prevoire "priest" (presbyter – presbyterem); li sire – le seigneur "lord" (senior – seniōrem); li enfes – l'enfant "child" (infāns – infantem). A few of these multi-stem nouns derive from Latin forms without stress shift, e.g. li om – le ome "man" (homō – hominem). All of these multi-stem nouns refer to people; other nouns with stress shift in Latin (e.g. amor – amōrem "love") have not survived. Interestingly, some of the same nouns with multiple stems in Old French and/or Old Occitan have come down in Italian in the nominative rather than the accusative (e.g. uomo "man" < homō, moglie "wife" < mulier), suggesting that a similar system existed in pre-literary Italian.

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

il hotel ej vɛɲiws natsionalizaws "the hotel has been nationalized"
il hotel natsionalizaw "the nationalized hotel"

Pronouns, determiners

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

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

Personal pronouns, in three persons and two genders.
A reflexive pronoun, used when the object is the same as the subject. This approximately corresponds to English "-self", but separate forms exist only in the third person, with no number marking.
Definite and indefinite articles, and in some languages, a partitive article that expresses the concept of "some".
A two-way of three-way distinction among demonstratives. Many languages have a three-way distinction of distance (near me, near you, near him) not paralleled in current English, but formerly present as "this/that/yon".
Relative pronouns and interrogatives, with the same forms used for both (similar to English "who" and "which").
Various indefinite pronouns and determiners (e.g. Spanish algún "some", alguién "someone", algo "something"; ningún "no", nadie "no one"; todo "every"; cada "each"; mucho "much/many/a lot", poco "few/little"; otro "other/another"; etc.).

Personal pronouns

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

Development from Latin

Latin had no third-person personal pronouns, using demonstratives in their place. The Romance languages have innovated a separate set of third-person pronouns by borrowing the demonstrative ille ("that (over there)"), and creating a separate reinforced demonstrative by attaching a variant of ecce "behold!" (or "here is ...") to the pronoun. Likewise, Latin had no third-person possessives, filling the gap with the genitive of the demonstrative pronouns. The Romance languages instead borrow the reflexive possessive, which then serves indifferently as both reflexive and non-reflexive possessive. Note that the reflexive, and hence the third-person possessive, is unmarked for the gender of the person being referred to. Hence, although gendered possessive forms do exist — e.g. Portuguese seu (masc.) vs. sua (fem.) — these refer to the gender of the object possessed, not the possessor. The gender of the possessor needs to be made clear by a collocation such as French la voiture à lui/elle, Portuguese o carro dele/dela, literally "the car of him/her". (In spoken Brazilian Portuguese, these collocations are the usual way of expressing the third-person possessive, since the former possessive seu carro now has the meaning "your car".)

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

Clitic pronouns

Object pronouns in Latin were normal words, but in the Romance languages they have become clitic forms, which must stand adjacent to a verb and merge phonologically with it. Originally, object pronouns could come either before or after the verb; sound change would often produce different forms in these two cases, with numerous additional complications and contracted forms when multiple clitic pronouns cooccurred. Catalan still largely maintains this system with a highly complex clitic pronoun system. Most languages, however, have simplified this system by undoing some of the clitic mergers and requiring clitics to stand in a particular position relative to the verb (usually after imperatives, before other finite forms, and either before or after non-finite forms depending on the language).

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

Most Romance languages are null subject languages. The subject pronouns are used only for emphasis and take the stress, and as a result are not clitics. In French, however (as in some Gallo-Italian languages of northern Italy), verbal agreement marking has degraded to the point that subject pronouns have become mandatory, and have turned into clitics. These forms cannot be stressed, so for emphasis the disjunctive pronouns must be used in combination with the clitic subject forms. The Gallo-Italian languages have actually gone further than this and merged the subject pronouns onto the verb as a new type of verb agreement marking, which must be present even when there is a subject noun phrase. (Some non-standard varieties of French treat disjunctive pronouns as arguments and clitic pronouns as agreement markers.^[16])

Familar/formal distinction

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

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

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

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

Portuguese innovated again in developing a new extra-polite pronoun o senhor "the sir", which in turn downgraded você. Hence, modern European Portuguese has a three-way distinction between "familiar" tu, "equalizing" você and "polite" o senhor. (The original second-person plural vós was discarded centuries ago in speech, and is used today only in translations of the Bible, where tu and vós serve as universal singular and plural pronouns, respectively.) Brazilian Portuguese, however, has discarded this system entirely, and most dialects simply use você (and plural vocês) as a general-purpose second person pronoun, combined with te (from tu) as the clitic object pronoun. The form o senhor is sometimes used in speech, but only in situations where an English speaker would say "sir" or "ma'am". The result is that second-person verb forms have disappeared entirely, and the whole pronoun system has been radically realigned.

Articles

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

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

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

I want milk.
Men arrived today.

But neither of these:

Milk is good for you.
I hate men.

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

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

Latin, at least originally, had a three-way distinction among demonstrative pronouns (hic iste ille) corresponding to first, second and third persons. Such a distinction is not reflected in modern English, but formerly existed as "this" vs. "that" vs. "yon(der)". In urban Latin of Rome, iste came to have a specifically derogatory meaning, but this innovation apparently did not reach the provinces and is not reflected in the modern Romance languages. A number of these languages still have such a three-way distinction, although hic has been lost and the other pronouns have shifted somewhat in meaning. For example, Spanish has este "this" vs. ese "that (near you)" vs. aquel (fem. aquella) "that (over yonder)". The Spanish pronouns derive, respectively, from Latin iste ipse accu-ille, where accu- is an emphatic prefix derived from eccum "behold it!", possibly with influence from atque "and".^[17]

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

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

Subsequent changes often reduced the number of demonstrative distinctions. Standard Italian, for example, has only a two-way distinction "this" vs. "that", as in English, with second-person and third-person demonstratives combined. In Catalan, however, a former three-way distinction aquest, aqueix, aquell has recently been reduced differently, with first-person and second-person demonstratives combined. Hence aquest means either "this" or "that (near you)"; on the phone, aquest is used to refer both to speaker and addressee. Old French had a similar distinction to Italian (cist/cest vs. cil/cel), both of which could function as either adjectives or pronouns. Modern French, however, has no distinction between "this" and "that": ce/cet, cette < cest, ceste is only an adjective, and celui, celle < cel lui, celle is only a pronoun, and both forms indifferently mean either "this" or "that". (The distinction between "this" and "that" can be made, if necessary, by adding the suffixes -ci "here" or -là "there", e.g. cette femme-ci "this woman" vs. cette femme-là "that woman", but this is rarely done except when specifically necessary to distinguish two entities from each other.)

Verbal Morphology

Origin of Romance tenses
Latin	Portuguese	Spanish	Catalan	Occitan	French	Rhaeto-Romance	Italian	Romanian	Sardinian
Present indicative	Present indicative
Present subjunctive	Present indicative
Imperfect indicative	Imperfect indicative
Imperfect subjunctive	Personal infinitive	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	Imperfect subjunctive / Personal infinitive
Future indicative	—	eres ("you are")	—	—	future of "to be" in Old French	—	—	—	—
Perfect indicative	Preterite	Simple preterite (literary except in Valencian)	Preterite	Remote past (literary)	—	Simple past (literary)	Simple past (literary except in the Oltenian dialect)	In Old Sardinian; only traces in modern lang
Perfect subjunctive	—
Pluperfect indicative	Literary pluperfect	Imperfect subjunctive (-ra form)	—	Second conditional in Old Occitan	Second preterite in very early Old French (Sequence of Saint Eulalia)	—	—	—	—
Pluperfect subjunctive	Imperfect subjunctive	Pluperfect indicative	—
Future perfect	Future subjunctive (very much alive)	Future subjunctive (moribund)	—	possible traces of future subjunctive in Old Occitan	—	—	possible traces of future subjunctive in Old Italian	—	—
New future	infinitive-habeo	voleo infinitive	voleo infinitive
New conditional	infinitive-habebam	infinitive-habuisset	infinitive-habuit	habeo infinitive (split apart from infinitive-habeo in 18th-century Romanian)	—
Preterite vs. present perfect (in speech)	preterite only (present perfect exists, but has different meaning)	both	both (but usually an analytic preterite vado infinitive is used)	?	present perfect only	present perfect only	present perfect only	present perfect only	present perfect only

	Infinitive	Indicative	Subjunctive	Imperative
Present	Preterite	Imperfect	Present	Present
Latin	dīcere	dīcit	dīxit	dicēbat	dīcat/dīcet	dīc
Aragonese	dicir	diz	dició	deciba/diciba	diga	diz
Asturian	dicir	diz	dixo	dicía	diga	di
Catalan	dir	diu	digué/va dir	deia	digui/diga	digues
Emilian	dîr	dîs	l'à détt / dgé	dgeva	dégga	dì
Franco-Provençal	dire	di	dè	djéve	dijisse/dzéze	dète
French	dire	dit	dit	disait	dise	dis
Galician	dicir	di	dixo	dicía	diga	di
Italian	dicere/dire	dice	disse	diceva	dica	dì
Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino)	dezir	dize	disho	dezía	diga	dezí
Leonese	dicire	diz	dixu	dicía	diga	di
Milanese	dì	dis	ha dit	diseva	diga	dì
Mirandolese	dir	diś	à dit	dgiva	diga	dì
Neapolitan	dicere	dice	dicette	diceva	diche	dije
Occitan	díser/dire	ditz	diguèt	disiá	diga	diga
Picard	dire	dit	–	disoait	diche	–
Piedmontese	dì	dis	dìsser¹ , l'ha dit	disìa	disa	dis
Portuguese	dizer	diz	disse	dizia	diga	diz²
Romanian	a zice, zicere³	zice	zise	zicea	zică	zi
Romansh	dir	di	ha ditg	discheva⁴	dia	di
Sardinian	nàrrere	nàrat	àt naradu	naraìat	nàrat	nàras
Sicilian	dìciri	dici	dissi	dicìa	dica⁵	dici
Spanish	decir	dice	dijo	decía	diga	di
Venetian	dir	dise	–	disea	diga	dì/disi
Walloon	dire	dit	a dit	dijheut	dixhe	di
Basic meaning	to say	he says	he said	he was saying	he says	say [thou]

Lexicon

Borrowing

Vulgar Latin borrowed many words, often from Germanic languages, that replaced words from Classical Latin during the Migration Period, including some basic vocabulary. Notable examples are *blancus (white), which replaced Classical Latin albus in most major languages; *guerra (war), which replaced bellum; and the words for the cardinal directions, where cognates of English "north", "south", "east" and "west" replaced the Classical Latin words borealis (or septentrionalis), australis (or meridionalis), orientalis, and occidentalis. (See History of French – The Franks.) Some Celtic words were incorporated into the basic vocabulary, partly for words with no Latin equivalent (camisia "shirt", carrus "cart", cerevisia "beer"), but in some cases replacing Latin vocabulary (cambiāre "to change", replacing mūtāre except in Portuguese; *pettia "piece", largely displacing pars (later resurrected) and eliminating frustum). Many Greek words also entered the lexicon. e.g. spatha "sword" (replacing gladium, cf. French épée, Spanish espada, Italian spada); cara "face" (partly replacing faciēs); colpe "blow" (replacing ictus, cf. Spanish golpe, French coup); cata "each" (replacing quisque); common suffixes *-ijāre/-izāre (French -iser, Spanish -ear/-izar, Italian -eggiare/-izzare, etc.), -ista.

Lexical replacement

Many basic nouns and verbs, especially those that were short and/or had irregular morphology, were replaced by longer derived forms with regular morphology. Nouns, and sometimes adjectives, were often replaced by diminutives: e.g. auris "ear" > auricula (orig. "little ear") > oricla (French oreille, Spanish oreja, etc.); avis "bird" > avicellus (orig. "little bird"; French oiseau); vetus "old" > vetulus > veclus (French vieil, Spanish viejo, etc.). Sometimes augmentative constructions were used instead: piscis "fish" > *piscione (orig. "big fish") > French poisson. Verbs were often replaced by frequentative constructions: canere "to sing" > cantāre; iacere "to throw" > iactāre > *iectāre (French jeter, Spanish echar, Italian gettare, etc.); iuvāre > adiūtāre (French aider, Spanish ayudar, Italian aiutare etc.); vēnārī "hunt" > replaced by *captiāre "to hunt", frequentative of capere "to seize" (French chasser, Spanish cazar, Italian cacciare, etc.).

Many Classical Latin words came to be associated with "high culture" and were replaced by originally "low" terms: equus "horse" > caballus (orig. "nag"); domus "house" > casa (orig. "hut"); ignis "fire" > focus (orig. "hearth"); strāta "street" > rūga (orig. "furrow") or callis (orig. "footpath") (but strāta remains in Italian). In some cases, terms from common occupations became generalized: invenīre "to find" > Ibero-Romance (f)afflāre (orig. "to sniff out", in hunting); advenīre "to arrive" > Ibero-Romance plicāre (orig. "to fold (sails)"), elsewhere arripāre (orig. "to get to the river bank"). The same thing sometimes happened to religious terms, due to the pervasive influence of Christianity: loquī "to speak" > parabolāre (orig. "to tell parables") or fabulārī (orig. "to tell stories"), based on Jesus' way of speaking in parables.

Many Latin combining prefixes were incorporated in the lexicon as new roots and verb stems, e.g. Italian estrarre (to extract) from Latin ex- (out of) and trahere (to drag).

A number of common Latin words that have disappeared in many or most Romance languages have survived either in the periphery or in remote corners (especially Sardinia). For example, Latin caseum "cheese" survives in the eastern and western edges (Portuguese queijo, Spanish queso, Romanian caş), but in the central areas has been replaced by formāticum, originally "formed (cheese)" (French fromage, Italian formaggio); similarly (com)edere "to eat (up)", which survives as Spanish/Portuguese comer but elsewhere is replaced by mandūcāre, originally "to chew" (French manger, Italian mangiare, Romanian mânca). In some cases, one language happens to preserve a word displaced elsewhere, e.g. Italian ogni "every" < omnem, displaced elsewhere by tōtum, originally "whole". Sardinian in particular preserves many words entirely lost elsewhere, e.g. emmo "yes" < immo "rather/yes/no", mannu "big" < magnum,^[18] narare "to say" < narrāre "to tell", and domo "house" < ablative]domō "at home". Sardinian even preserves some words that were already archaic in Classical Latin, e.g. akina "grape" < acinam, peθa "meat" < *pettiam.

Latinisms

During medieval times, large numbers of words were borrowed directly from Classical Latin (so-called latinisms), either in their original form (learned words) or in something approximating their original form (semi-learned words). These introduced many doublets, e.g. Latin fragilis > French fragile "fragile" (learned) and frêle "frail" (popular); Latin fabrica "craft, manufacture" > French fabrique "factory" (learned) and forge "forge" (popular), Spanish fábrica "factory" (learned) and fragua "forge" (popular); Latin lēgālis "legal" > French légal "legal" (learned) and loyal "loyal" (popular), Spanish legal "legal" (learned) and leal "loyal" (popular); advōcātus "advocate" > French avocat "lawyer" (learned) and avoué "attorney, solicitor" (popular); Latin polīre "to polish" > Portuguese polir "to polish" (learned) and puir "to wear thin" (popular). Sometimes triplets can be produced: Latin articulus "joint" > Portuguese artículo "(anatomical) articulation" (learned), artigo "article" (semi-learned), artelho "ankle" (popular; obsolete or dialectal). In many cases, the learned word simply displaced the original popular word, e.g. Spanish crudo "crude" (Old Spanish cruo); French légume "vegetable" (Old French leüm); Portuguese flor "flower" (Old Portuguese chor). The learned word always looks more like the original than the popular word does, since regular sound change has been bypassed; likewise, it usually has a meaning closer to the original.

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

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

Sound changes

Consonants

Significant sound changes affected the consonants of the Romance languages.

Apocope

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

Many final consonants were rare, occurring only in certain prepositions (e.g. ad "towards", apud "at, near (a person)"), conjunctions (sed "but"), demonstratives (e.g. illud "that (over there)", hoc "this"), and nominative singular noun forms, especially of neuter nouns (e.g. lac "milk", mel "honey", cor "heart"). Many of these prepositions and conjunctions were replaced by others, while the nouns were regularized into forms that avoided the final consonants (e.g. *lacte, *mele, *core).

Final -m was dropped in Vulgar Latin. Even in Classical Latin, final -am, -um (accusative endings) was often elided in poetic meter, suggesting the m was weakly pronounced, probably marking the nasalisation of the vowel before it. This nasal vowel lost its nasalization in the Romance languages except in monosyllables, where it became /n/ (cf. Spanish quien < quem, French rien < rem).

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

Final -t in third-person singular verb forms, and -nt (often reduced to -n) in third-person plural verb forms.
Final -s in a large number of morphological endings (verb endings -ās/-ēs/-īs/-is, -mus, -tis; nominative singular -us/-is; plural -ās/-ōs/-ēs) and certain other words (trēs "three", crās "tomorrow", etc.).
Final -n in some monosyllables (from earlier -m), and where -nt reduced to -n.
Final -r, -d in some prepositions (e.g. ad, per), which were proclitic forms that attached phonologically to the following word.
Very occasionally, final -c, e.g. Occitan oc "yes" < hoc (possibly protected by a final epenthetic vowel at one point).

Final -t was eventually dropped in many languages, although this often occurred several centuries after the Vulgar Latin period. For example, the reflex of -t was dropped in Old French and Old Spanish only around 1100 AD. In Old French, this occurred only when a vowel still preceded the consonant. Hence venit "he comes" > Old French vient, and the /t/ was never dropped. (It survives to this day in liaison forms, e.g. vient-il? "is he coming?" /vjɛ̃ti(l)/.)

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

Central Western Romance languages eventually regained a large number of final consonants through the general loss of final /e/ and /o/, e.g. Catalan llet "milk" < lactem, foc "fire" < focum, peix "fish" < piscem. In French, most of these secondary final consonants were lost, but tertiary final consonants later arose through the loss of /ǝ/ < -a. Hence masculine frigidum "cold" > Old French /froit/ > froid /fʁwa/, feminine frigidam > Old French /froidǝ/ > froide /fʁwad/.

Palatalization

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

The following historical stages occurred:

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

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

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

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

Original /j/ has the same outcome as palatalized /g/ everywhere.
Romanian fairly consistently has /z/ < /dz/ from palatalized /d/, but /dʒ/ from palatalized /g/.
Italian inconsistently has /ddz~ddʒ/ from palatalized /d/, and /ddʒ/ from palatalized /g/.
Most other languages have the same results for palatalized /d/ and /g/: consistent /dʒ/ initially, but either /j/ or /dʒ/ medially (depending on language and exact context). But Spanish has /j/ initially except before /o/, /u/; nearby Gascon is similar.

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

In French, the outcomes of /k/ palatalized by /e,i,j/ and by /a/ were different: centum "hundred" > cent /sɑ̃/ but cantum "song" > chant /ʃɑ̃/.

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

The effect of palatalization is indicated in the writing systems of almost all Romance languages, where the letters ⟨c g⟩ have the "hard" pronunciation [k g] in most situations, but a "soft" pronunciation (e.g. French/Portuguese [s ʒ], Italian/Romanian [tʃ dʒ]) before ⟨e i y⟩. (Because Middle English was originally written by scribes speaking Norman French, the English spelling system has the same peculiarity.) This has the effect of keeping the modern spelling similar to the original Latin spelling, but complicates the relationship between sound and letter. In particular, the hard sounds must be written differently before ⟨e i y⟩ (e.g. Italian ⟨ch gh⟩, Portuguese ⟨qu gu⟩), and likewise for the soft sounds when not before these letters (e.g. Italian ⟨ci gi⟩, Portuguese ⟨ç j⟩). Furthermore, in Spanish, Catalan, Occitan and Brazilian Portuguese, the use of ⟨u⟩ to signal the hard pronunciation before ⟨e i y⟩ means that a different spelling is also needed to signal the sounds /kw gw/ before these letters (Spanish ⟨cu gü⟩, Catalan, Occitan and Brazilian Portuguese ⟨qü gü⟩).^[19] This produces a number of orthographic alternations in verbs whose pronunciation is entirely regular. The following are examples of corresponding first-person plural indicative and subjunctive in a number of regular Portuguese verbs: marcamos marquemos "we mark"; caçamos cacemos "we hunt"; chegamos cheguemos "we arrive"; averiguamos averigüemos "we verify"; adequamos adeqüemos "we adapt"; oferecemos ofereçamos "we offer"; dirigimos dirijamos "we drive" erguemos ergamos "we raise"; delinquimos delincamos "we commit a crime".

Lenition

Stop consonants shifted by lenition in Vulgar Latin.

The voiced labial consonants /b/ and /w/ (represented by ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩, respectively) both developed a fricative [β] as an intervocalic allophone.^[20] This is clear from the orthography; in medieval times, the spelling of a consonantal ⟨v⟩ is often used for what had been a ⟨b⟩ in Classical Latin, or the two spellings were used interchangeably. In many Romance languages (Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.), this fricative later developed into a /v/; but in others (Spanish, Galician, some Catalan and Occitan dialects, etc.) reflexes of /b/ and /w/ simply merged into a single phoneme.

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

Single voiceless plosives became voiced: -p-, -t-, -c- → -b-, -d-, -g-. Subsequently, in some languages they were further weakened, either becoming fricatives or approximants, [β̞], [ð̞], [ɣ˕] (as in Spanish) or disappearing entirely (as /t/ and /k/, but not /p/, in French). The following example shows progressive weakening of original /t/: e.g. vītam > Italian vita [ˈvita], Portuguese vida [ˈvidɐ] (European Portuguese [ˈviðɐ]), Spanish vida [ˈbiða], French vie [vi].

The voiced plosives /d/ and /ɡ/ tended to disappear.
The plain sibilant -s- [s] was also voiced to [z] between vowels, although in many languages its spelling has not changed. (In Spanish, intervocalic [z] was later devoiced back to [s].)
The double plosives became single: -pp-, -tt-, -cc-, -bb-, -dd-, -gg- → -p-, -t-, -c-, -b-, -d-, -g- in most languages. In French spelling, double consonants are merely etymological.
The double sibilant -ss- [sː] also became phonetically single [s], although in many languages its spelling has not changed.

Consonant length is no longer phonemically distinctive in most Romance languages. However some languages of Italy (Italian, Sardinian, Sicilian, and numerous other varieties of central and southern Italy) do have long consonants like /ɡɡ/, /dd/, /bb/, /kk/, /tt/, /pp/, /ll/, /mm/, /nn/, /ss/, and to a lesser extent /rr/, etc., where the doubling indicates a short hold before the consonant is released, in many cases with distinctive lexical value: e.g. note /ˈnɔ.te/ (notes) vs. notte /ˈnɔt.te/ (night), cade /ˈka.de/ (s/he, it falls) vs. cadde /ˈkad.de/ (s/he, it fell). They may even occur at the beginning of words in Romanesco, Neapolitan and Sicilian, and are occasionally indicated in writing, e.g. Sicilian cchiù (more), and ccà (here). In general, the consonants /b/, /ts/, and /dz/ are long at the start of a word, while the archiphoneme |R| is realised as a trill /r/ in the same position.

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

Prosthesis

In Western Romance, an epenthetic or prosthetic vowel was inserted at the beginning of any word that began with /s/ and another consonant: spatha "sword" > Spanish/Portuguese espada, Catalan espasa, Old French espeḍe > modern épée. In Italian, syllabification rules were preserved instead by vowel-final articles, thus feminine spada as la spada, but instead of rendering the masculine *il spaghetto, lo spaghetto came to be the norm. Though receding at present, Italian once had an epenthetic /i/ if a consonant preceded such clusters, so that 'in Switzerland' was in /i/Svizzera. Some speakers still use the prosthetic /i/, and it is fossilized in a few set phrases as per iscritto 'in writing'.

Stressed vowels

Loss of vowel length, reorientation

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

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

There is evidence that in the imperial period all the short vowels except a differed by quality as well as by length from their long counterparts.^[21] So, for example ē was pronounced close-mid /eː/ while ĕ was pronounced open-mid /ɛ/, and ī was pronounced close /iː/ while ĭ was pronounced near-close /ɪ/.

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

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

The simplest outcome was in Sardinian,^[22] where the former long and short vowels in Latin simply coalesced, e.g. /ĕ ē/ > /e/, /ĭ ī/ > /i/: This produced a simple five-vowel system /a e i o u/.
In most areas, however (technically, the Italo-Western languages), the near-close vowels /ɪ ʊ/ lowered and merged into the high-mid vowels /e o/. As a result, Latin pira "pear" and vēra "true", came to rhyme (e.g. Italian and Spanish pera, vera, and Old French poire, voire. Similarly, Latin nucem (from nux "nut") and vōcem (from vōx "voice") become Italian noce, voce, Portuguese noz, voz, and French noix, voix. This produced a seven-vowel system /a ɛ e i ɔ o u/, still maintained in conservative languages such as Italian and Portuguese, and lightly transformed in Spanish (where /ɛ/ > /je/, /ɔ/ > /we/).
In the Eastern Romance languages (particularly, Romanian), the front vowels /ĕ ē ĭ ī/ evolved as in the majority of languages, but the back vowels /ŏ ō ŭ ū/ evolved as in Sardinian. This produced an unbalanced six-vowel system: /a ɛ e i o u/. In modern Romanian, this system has been significantly transformed, with /ɛ/ > /je/ and with new vowels /ǝ ɨ/ evolving, leading to a balanced seven-vowel system with central as well as front and back vowels: /a e i ǝ ɨ o u/.
Sicilian is sometimes described as having its own distinct vowel system. In fact, Sicilian passed through the same developments as the main bulk of Italo-Western languages. Subsequently, however, high-mid vowels (but not low-mid vowels) were raised in all syllables, stressed and unstressed; i.e. /e o/ > /i u/.

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

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

Latin diphthongs

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

ae became /ɛː/ by the 1st century AD at the latest. Although this sound was still distinct from all existing vowels, the neutralization of Latin vowel length eventually caused its merger with /ɛ/ < short e: e.g. caelum "sky" > French ciel, Spanish/Italian cielo, Portuguese céu /sɛw/, with the same vowel as in mele "honey" > French/Spanish miel, Italian miele, Portuguese mel /mɛl/. A few words show an early merger of ae with /eː/, as in praeda > Gallo-Romance /preːða/ > French proie "prey" (vs. the expected form *priée).

oe generally merged with /eː/: poenam "pain" > Italo-Romance /pena/ > Spanish/Italian pena, French peine. There are relatively few such outcomes, since oe was rare in Classical Latin (most original instances had become Classical ū, as in Old Latin oinos "one" > Classical ūnus^[23]).

au merged with ō in the popular speech of Rome already by the 1st century BC. A number of authors remarked on this explicitly, e.g. Cicero's taunt that the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher had changed his name from Claudius to ingratiate himself with the masses. This change never penetrated far from Rome, however, and the pronunciation /au/ was maintained for centuries in the vast majority of Latin-speaking areas, although it eventually developed into some variety of o in many languages. For example, Italian and French have /ɔ/, but this post-dates diphthongization and the French-specific palatalization /ka/ > /tʃ/ (hence causa > chose). Spanish has /o/, but Portuguese spelling maintains ⟨ou⟩, only recently developed to /o/ (and still /ou/ in many Brazilian dialects). Occitan, Romanian, southern Italian dialects, and many other minority Romance languages still have /au/. A 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 /koda/, Occitan coa, Romanian coadă (all meaning "tail") must all derive from cōda rather than Classical cauda.^[24] Similarly, Portuguese orelha, Romanian ureche (both "ear") must derive from oricla rather than Classical auris, and the form oricla is in fact reflected in the Appendix Probi (but Occitan aurelha reflects auricla, possibly influenced by a reflex of auris).

Further developments

Metaphony

An early process that operated in all Romance languages to varying degrees was metaphony, conceptually similar to the umlaut process so characteristic of the Germanic languages. Depending on the language, certain stressed vowels were raised (or sometimes diphthongized) either by a final /i/ or /u/ or by a directly following /j/. Metaphony is most extensive in the Italo-Romance languages, and applies to nearly all languages in Italy; however, it is absent from Tuscan, and hence from standard Italian.

Raising-type metaphony in Servigliano, in the Marches of Italy
Unaffected	Affected
/ˈmetto/ "I put"	/ˈmitti/ "you put"
/ˈkwesto/ "this (neut.)"	/ˈkwistu/ "this (masc.)"
/moˈdɛsta/ "modest (fem.)"	/moˈdestu/ "modest (masc.)"
/ˈprɛdoko/ "I preach"	/ˈprediki/ "you preach"
/ˈfjore/ "flower"	/ˈfjuri/ "flowers"
/ˈsposa/ "wife"	/ˈspusu/ "husband"
/ˈmɔre/ "he dies"	/ˈmori/ "you die"
/ˈmɔʃa/ "depressed (fem.)"	/ˈmoʃu/ "depressed (fem.)"

Diphthongization-type metaphony in Calvallo, in the Basilicata region of southern Italy
Unaffected	Affected
/ˈpɛre/ "foot"	/ˈpjeri/ "feet"
/ˈlɛddʒe/ "light (fem.)"	/ˈljeddʒi/ "light (masc.)"
/ˈpɛnʒo/ "I think"	/ˈpjenʒi/ "you think"
/ˈmese/ "month"	/ˈmisi/ "months"
/ˈmette/ "he puts"	/ˈmitti/ "you put"
/ˈvɔsko/ "forest"	/ˈvwoski/ "forests"
/ˈɣrɔssa/ "big (fem.)"	/ˈɣrwossu "big (masc.)"
/ˈmɔvo/ "I move"	/ˈmwovi/ "you move"
/ˈkavrone/ "carbon"	/ˈkavruni/ "carbons"
/ˈsola/ "alone (fem.)"	/ˈsulu/ "alone (masc.)"
/ˈkorre/ "he runs"	/ˈkurri/ "you run"

Metaphony in the southern Italian languages (those to the south of Tuscany) is triggered by final /i/ and /u/. High-mid vowels /e o/ are raised to /i u/, and low-mid vowels /ɛ ɔ/ are either raised to /e o/ or diphthongized to /je wo/. Metaphony is not triggered by final /o/. The main occurrences of final /i/ are as follows:

The plural of nouns in -o (< nominative plural -ī).
The plural of nouns in -e (either a regular development of third-declension plural -ēs, or from analogical plural -ī).
The second-person singular present tense (a regular development of -ēs in verbs in -ere, -ēre, -īre, and analogical in verbs in -āre; in Old Italian, the regular ending -e is still found in -are verbs).
The first-person singular past indicative (< -ī).

The main occurrences of final /o/ are as follows:

The first-person singular present indicative (< -ō).
Masculine "mass" nouns, and "neuter" (mass-noun) demonstratives (disputed origin).

The main occurrence of final /u/ is in masculine "count" nouns (< -um).

Metaphony in the northern Italian languages (those to the north of Tuscany) is triggered only by final /i/. In these languages, as in Tuscan, final /u/ was lowered to /o/; this evidently happened prior to the action of metaphony. In these languages, metaphony also tends to apply to final /a/, raising it to /ɛ/ or /e/.

In most Italian languages, most final vowels have become obscured (in the south) or lost (in the north), and the effects of metaphony are often the only markers of masculine vs. feminine and singular vs. plural.

In some of the Astur-Leonese dialects, in northern Spain, the same distinction between final /o/ and /u/ exists (right down to the distinction between mass and count nouns), along with a very similar sort of metaphony triggered by final /u/. In these dialects, nouns with final /u/ have a plural in /os/ (< -ōs).

Sardinian likewise has a distinction between final /o/ and /u/ (again with plural /os/), along with metaphony. In the conservative Logudorese and Nuorese dialects, the result of metaphony is a non-phonemic alternation between [e o] (when final /i/ or /u/ occurs) and [ɛ ɔ] (with other final vowels). In Campidanese, final /e o/ have been raised to /i u/, with the result that the metaphonic alternations have been phonemicized.

Raising of /ɔ/ to /o/ by a following final /u/ occurs sporadically in Portuguese. Example: porcum, porcōs "pig, pigs" > PIR ˈpɔrku, ˈpɔrkos > Portuguese porco ˈporku vs. porcos ˈpɔrkus; novum, novōs, novam, novās "new (masc., masc. pl., fem., fem. pl.)" > PIR ˈnɔvu, ˈnɔvos, ˈnɔva, ˈnɔvas > Portuguese novo ˈnovu vs. novos, nova, novas ˈnɔvus, ˈnɔva, ˈnɔvas. In this case, Old Portuguese apparently had /u/ in the singular vs. /os/ in the plural, despite the spelling ⟨-o -os⟩; a later development has raised plural /os/ to /us/. Unlike elsewhere, this development is only sporadic and only affects /ɔ/, not /ɛ/. Furthermore, the mass/count distinction is expressed very differently: Only a few "mass neuter" demonstratives exist, and they have a higher rather than lower vowel (tudo "everything" vs. todo "all (masc.)", isto "this (neut.)" vs. este "this (masc.)"). In addition, the original pattern has been extended to some nouns originally in /o/, e.g. todo /o/ "all" vs. plural todos /ɔ/ < tōtum, tōtōs.

In all of the Western Romance languages, metaphony was triggered by a final /i/ (especially of the first-person singular of the preterite), raising mid-high stressed vowels to high vowels. (This does not normally occur in the nominative plural noun forms in Old French and Old Occitan that have a reflex of nominative plural /i/, suggesting that these developments were removed early by analogy.) Examples:

vīgintī > *vigintī > PIR /veˈenti/ > Italian venti; but > pre-PWR /veˈinti/ > PWR /veˈinte/ > Old Spanish veínte (> modern veinte /bejnte/), Old Portuguese veínte (> viínte > modern vinte), Old French vint (> modern vingt /vɛ̃/).
fēcī, fēcit > Italian feci, fece; but > pre-PWR /ˈfedzi, ˈfedzet/ > /ˈfidzi, ˈfedzet/ > PWR /ˈfidze, ˈfedzet/ > Old Spanish fize, fezo (modern hice, hizo), Portuguese fiz, fez, Old French fis, fist (< *fis, feist).

Romanian shows metaphony of the opposite sort, where final /a/ (and also /e/, especially in the case of /o/) caused a diphthongization /e/ > /ea/, /je/ > /ja/, /o/ > /oa/: cēram "wax" > ceară; equam "mare" > /*ɛpa/ > /*jepa/ > iapă; flōrem "flower" > floare; nostrum, nostrī, nostram, nostrās "our (masc. sg., masc. pl., fem. sg., fem. pl.)" > /*nostru, nostri, nostra, nostre/ > nostru, noştri, noastră, noastre.

Diphthongization

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

Spanish consistently diphthongized all low-mid vowels /ɛ ɔ/ > /je we/ except for before certain palatal consonants (which raised the vowels to high-mid before diphthongization took place).
Romanian similarly diphthongized /ɛ/ to /je/ (the corresponding vowel /ɔ/ did not develop from Proto-Romance).
Italian diphthongized /ɛ/ >/jɛ/ and /ɔ/ >/wɔ/ in open syllables (in the situations where vowels were lengthened in Proto-Romance).
French similarly diphthongized /ɛ ɔ/ in open syllables (when lengthened), along with /a e o/: /aː ɛː eː ɔː oː/ > /ae ie ei uo ou/ > OF /e je oi we eu/ > modern /e je wa œ œ/.
French also diphthongized /ɛ ɔ/ before palatalized consonants, especially /j/. Further development was as follows: /ɛj/ > /iej/ > /i/; /ɔj/ > /uoj/ > early OF /uj/ > modern /ɥi/.
Catalan dipthongized /ɛ ɔ/ before /j/ from palatalized consonants, just like French, with similar results: /ɛj/ > /i/, /ɔj/ > /uj/.

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

In French and Italian, the distinction between low-mid and high-mid vowels occurred only in closed syllables. Standard Italian more or less maintains this. In French, /e/ and /ɛ/ merged by the 12th century or so, and the distinction between /ɔ/ and /o/ was eliminated without merging by the sound changes /u/ > /y/, /o/> /u/. Generally this led to a situation where both [e,o] and [ɛ,ɔ] occur allophonically, with the high-mid vowels in open syllables and the low-mid vowels in closed syllables. This is still the situation in modern Spanish, for example. In French, however, both [e/ɛ] and [o/ɔ] were partly rephonemicized: Both /e/ and /ɛ/ occur in open syllables as a result of /aj/ > /ɛ/, and both /o/ and /ɔ/ occur in closed syllables as a result of /al/ > /au/ > /o/.

French also had numerous falling diphthongs from a /j/ spit out before a palatalized sound, including any sound that underwent any of the palatalization processes in Proto-Romance or later: e.g. pacem "peace" > PWR *padʲzʲe > OF paiz /paits/; punctum "point" > PWR *ponjtʲo > *poɲtʲo > OF point. During the Old French period, /l/ before a consonant vocalized to /w/, producing many new falling diphthongs: e.g. dulcem "sweet" > PWR *doltʲsʲe > OF dolz > douz /douts/; fallit "it lacks" > OF falt > faut "it is necessary"; bellum "beautiful" > OF beau /bɛaw/. By the end of the Middle French period, all of these falling diphthongs disappeared and were replaced by either monophthongs or rising diphthongs: proto OF /aj ɛj jɛj ej jej wɔj oj uj al ɛl el il ɔl ol ul/ > early OF /aj ɛj i ej yj oj yj aw ɛaw ew i ɔw ow y/ > modern spelling ⟨ai ei i oi ui oi ui au eau eu i ou ou u⟩ > modern French /ɛ ɛ i wa ɥi wa ɥi o o ø i u u y/.

Nasalization

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

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

Front-rounded vowels

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

Unstressed vowels

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

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

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

In final unstressed syllables, results were somewhat complex. One of the more difficult issues is the development of final short -u, which appears to have been raised to /u/ rather than lowered to /o/, as happened in all other syllables. However, it is possible that in reality, final /u/ comes from long *-ū < -um, where original final -m caused vowel lengthening as well as nasalization. Evidence of this comes from Rhaeto-Romance, in particular Sursilvan, which preserves reflexes of both final -us and -um, and where the latter, but not the former, triggers metaphony (see above). This suggests the development -us > /ʊs/ > /os/, but -um > /ũː/ > /u/.^[25]

Examples of evolution of final unstressed vowels
English	Latin	Proto-Italo-Western	Conservative Central Italian	Italian	Spanish	Catalan	Old French
one (fem.)	ūnam	una	una	una	una	una	une
door	portam	porta	porta	porta	puerta	porta	porte
seven	septem	sette	sette	sette	siete	set	set
sea	mare	mare	mare	mare	mar	mar	mer
peace	pācem	pace	pace	pace	paz	paç	paiz
part	partem	parte	parte	parte	parte	part	part
mother	mātrem	matre	matre	madre	madre	mare	meḍre
twenty	vīgintī	veenti	vinti	venti	veinte	vint	vint
four	quattuor	quattro	quattro	quattro	cuatro	quatre	quatre
eight	octō	octo	ɔtto	otto	ocho	vuit	huit
when	quandō	quando	quando	quando	cuando	quan	quant
fourth	quartum	quartu	quartu	quarto	cuarto	quart	quart
one (masc.)	ūnum	unu	unu	uno	uno	un	un
port	portum	portu	portu	porto	puerto	port	port

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

In Tuscan (including standard Italian), final /u/ merged into /o/.
In the Western Romance languages, final /i/ eventually merged into /e/ (although final /i/ triggered metaphony before that). Conservative languages like Spanish largely maintain that system, but drop final /e/ after certain single consonants, e.g. /r/, /l/, /n/, /d/, /z/ (< palatalized c).
In the Gallo-Romance languages (part of Western Romance), final /o/ and /e/ were dropped entirely unless that produced an impossible final cluster (e.g. /tr/), in which case a "prop vowel" /e/ was added. This left only two final vowels: /a/ and prop vowel /e/. Catalan preserves this system.
In primitive Old French (one of the Gallo-Romance languages), these two remaining vowels merged into /ǝ/.

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

In French, most final consonants were dropped, and then final /ǝ/ was also dropped. The /ǝ/ is still preserved in spelling as a final silent -e, whose main purpose is to signal that the previous consonant is pronounced, e.g. port "port" /pɔʁ/ vs. porte "door" /pɔʁt/. These changes also eliminated the difference between singular and plural in most words: ports "ports" (still /pɔʁ/), portes "doors" (still /pɔʁt/). Final consonants reappear in liaison contexts (in close connection with a following vowel-initial word), e.g. nous /nu/ "we" vs. nous avons /nuz-aˈvɔ̃/ "we have", il fait /il fɛ/ "he does" vs. fait-il?" /fɛt-il/ "does he?".
In Catalan, final unstressed /as/ > /es/.
In Portuguese, final unstressed /o/ and /u/ were apparently preserved intact for a while, since final unstressed /u/, but not /o/ or /os/, triggered metaphony (see above). Final-syllable unstressed /o/ was raised in preliterary times to /u/, but always still written ⟨o⟩. At some point (perhaps in late Old Portuguese), final-syllable unstressed /e/ was raised to /i/ (but still written ⟨e⟩); this remains in Brazilian Portuguese, but has developed to /ɨ/ in European Portuguese.

Intertonic vowels

The so-called intertonic vowels are those unstressed vowels not either initial or final, i.e. those vowels that are between the initial or final syllable and the tonic (i.e. stressed) syllable, hence intertonic. Intertonic vowels were the most subject to loss or modification. Already in Vulgar Latin, intertonic vowels between a single consonant and a following /r/ or /l/ tended to drop: vetulum "old" > veclum > Italian vecchio, French vieil, Spanish viejo, Portuguese velho. But many languages ultimately dropped almost all intertonic vowels.

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

septimānam "week" > Italian settimana, Romanian săptămână but Spanish/Portuguese semana, French semaine, Catalan setmana
quattuordecim "fourteen" > Italian quattordici, but Spanish catorce, Portuguese/French quatorze
*metipsimum > *medisimum > Italian medesimo but Spanish mismo, Portuguese mesmo, Old French meḍesme > French même
*bonitātem > Italian bonità or bontà, Romanian bunătate but Spanish bondad, Portuguese bondade, Old French bonté
collocāre "to place" > Spanish colgar "to hang", French coucher "to lie (down), sleep"
commūnicāre "to take communion" > Romanian cuminecare but Portuguese comungar, Spanish comulgar, Old French comungier
carricāre "to carry (in a chariot)" > Spanish cargar "to load", French charger "to load"
fabricam "forge" > /*fawrga/ > Spanish fragua, Portuguese frágua, French forge
disjējūnāre "to breakfast" > Old French disner > French dîner "to dine" (but disjējūnat > Old French desjune "he dines" > French (il) déjeune "he eats lunch")
adjūtāre "to help" > Italian aiutare, Romanian ajuta but French aider (Spanish ayudar, Portuguese ajudar based on stressed forms, e.g. ayuda/ajuda "he helps"; cf. Old French aidier "to help" vs. aiue "he helps")

Portuguese is more conservative in maintaining some intertonic vowels other than /a/: e.g. *offerēscere "to offer" > Portuguese oferecer vs. Spanish ofrecer, French offrir (< *offerīre); -ābilem > Italian -evole, Portuguese -avel vs. Spanish/French -able. French, on the other hand, drops even intertonic /a/ after the stress: stephanum > Spanish Estévan but Old French Estievne > French Étienne. Many cases of /a/ before the stress also ultimately dropped in French: sacramentum "sacrament" > Old French sairement > French serment "oath".

Writing systems

Main article: Latin Alphabet

The Romance languages have kept the writing system of Latin, adapting it to their evolution. One exception was Romanian before the 19th century, where, after the Roman retreat, literacy was reintroduced through the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet by Slavic influences. The Cyrillic alphabet was also used for Romanian (Moldovan) in the USSR. Also the non-Christian populations of Spain used the systems of their culture languages (Arabic and Hebrew) to write Romance languages such as Ladino and Mozarabic in aljamiado.

Letters

Spelling of results of palatalization and related sounds
Sound	Spanish	Portuguese	French	Italian	Romanian
/k/, not + ⟨e, i, y⟩	⟨c⟩
/k/ + ⟨e, i, y⟩	⟨qu⟩			⟨ch⟩
palatalized /k/ (/tʃ/~/s/~/θ/), + ⟨e, i, y⟩	⟨c⟩
palatalized /k/ (/tʃ/~/s/~/θ/), not + ⟨e, i, y⟩	⟨z⟩	⟨ç⟩		⟨ci⟩
/kw/, not + ⟨e, i, y⟩	⟨qu⟩
/kw/ + ⟨e, i, y⟩	⟨cu⟩	⟨qu⟩^[26]
/g/, not + ⟨e, i, y⟩	⟨g⟩
/g/ + ⟨e, i, y⟩	⟨gu⟩			⟨gh⟩
palatalized /g/ (/dʒ/~/ʒ/~/x/), + ⟨e, i, y⟩	⟨g⟩
palatalized /g/ (/dʒ/~/ʒ/~/x/), not + ⟨e, i, y⟩	⟨j⟩			⟨gi⟩
/gw/, not + ⟨e ,i, y⟩	⟨gu⟩
/gw/ +⟨e, i, y⟩	⟨gü⟩	⟨gu⟩^[27]
(former) /ʎ/	⟨ll⟩	⟨lh⟩	⟨il(l)⟩	⟨gli⟩	—
/ɲ/	⟨ñ⟩	⟨nh⟩	⟨gn⟩		—

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

While most of the 23 basic Latin letters have maintained their phonetic value, for some of them it has diverged considerably; and the new letters added since the Middle Ages have been put to different uses in different scripts. Some letters, notably H and Q, have been variously combined in digraphs or trigraphs (see below) to represent phonetic phenomena that could not be recorded with the basic Latin alphabet, or to get around previously established spelling conventions. Most languages added auxiliary marks (diacritics) to some letters, for these and other purposes.

The spelling rules of most Romance languages are fairly simple, but subject to considerable regional variation. The letters with most conspicuous phonetic variations, between Romance languages or with respect to Latin, are

B: May alternate in pronunciation with v, for example in some variants of Spanish.

C: Generally a "hard" [k], but "soft" (fricative or affricate) before e, i, or y.

G: Generally a "hard" [ɡ], but "soft" (fricative or affricate) before e, i, or y. In some languages, like Spanish, the hard g is pronounced as a fricative [ɣ] after vowels. In Romansch, the soft g is a voiced palatal plosive [ɟ] or a voiced alveolo-palatal affricate [dʑ].

H: Silent in most languages; used to form various digraphs. But represents [h] in Romanian, Walloon and Gascon Occitan.

J: Represents a fricative in most languages, or the palatal approximant [j] in Romansh and in several of the languages of Italy. Italian does not use this letter in native words. Usually pronounced like the soft g (except in Romansch and the languages of Italy).

Q: As in Latin, its phonetic value is that of a hard c, and in native words it is always followed by a (sometimes silent) u. Romanian does not use this letter in native words.

S: Generally voiceless [s], but voiced [z] between vowels in most languages. In Spanish, Romanian, Galician and several varieties of Italian, however, it is always pronounced voiceless. At the end of syllables, it may represent special allophonic pronunciations. In Romansh, it also stands for a voiceless or voiced fricative, [ʃ] or [ʒ], before certain consonants.

W: No Romance language uses this letter in native words, with the exception of Walloon.

X: Its pronunciation is rather variable, both between and within languages. In the Middle Ages, the languages of Iberia used this letter to denote the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ], which is still the case in Modern Catalan and Portuguese. With the Renaissance the classical pronunciation [ks] – or similar consonant clusters, such as [ɡz], [ɡs], or [kθ] – were frequently reintroduced in latinisms and hellenisms. In Venetian it represents [z], and in Ligurian the voiced postalveolar fricative [ʒ]. Italian does not use this letter in native words.

Y: This letter is not used in most languages, with the prominent exceptions of French and Spanish, where it represents [j] before vowels (or various similar fricatives such as the palatal fricative [ʝ], in Spanish), and the vowel or semivowel [i] elsewhere.

Z: In most languages it represents the sound [z], but in Italian it denotes the affricates [dz] and [ts] (which, although not normally in contrast, are usually strictly assigned lexically in any single variety: Standard Italian gazza 'magpie' always with [ddz], mazza 'club, mace' only with [tts]), in Romansh the voiceless affricate [ts], and in Galician and Spanish it denotes either the voiceless dental fricative [θ] or [s].

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

Digraphs and trigraphs

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

CI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy and Romanian to represent /tʃ/ before A, O, or U.

CH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Romanian, Romansh and Sardinian to represent /k/ before E or I; /tʃ/ in Occitan, Spanish, Astur-leonese and Galician; [c] or [tɕ] in Romansh before A, O or U; and /ʃ/ in most other languages. In Catalan it is used in some old spelling conventions for /k/.

DD: used in Sicilian and Sardinian to represent the voiced retroflex plosive /ɖ/. In recent history more accurately transcribed as DDH.

DJ: used in Walloon and Catalan for /dʒ/.

GI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy and Romanian to represent /dʒ/ before A, O, or U, and in Romansh to represent [ɟi] or /dʑi/ or (before A, E, O, and U) [ɟ] or /dʑ/

GH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Romanian, Romansh and Sardinian to represent /ɡ/ before E or I, and in Galician for the voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ħ/ (not standard sound).

GL: used in Romansh before consonants and I and at the end of words for /ʎ/.

GLI: used in Italian and Romansh for /ʎ/.

GN: used in French, Italian, Romance languages in Italy and Romansh for /ɲ/, as in champignon or gnocchi.

GU: used before E or I to represent /ɡ/ or /ɣ/ in all Romance languages except Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Romansh, and Romanian (which use GH instead).

IG: used at the end of word in Catalan for /tʃ/, as in maig, safareig or enmig.

IX: used between vowels or at the end of word in Catalan for /ʃ/, as in caixa or calaix.

LH: used in Portuguese and Occitan /ʎ/.

LL: used in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Astur-leonese, Norman and Dgèrnésiais, originally for /ʎ/ which has merged in some cases with /j/. Represents /l/ in French unless it follows I (i) when it represents /j/ (or /ʎ/ in some dialects). It's used in Occitan for a long /ll/

L·L: used in Catalan for a geminate consonant [ɫɫ].

NH: used in Portuguese and Occitan for /ɲ/, used in official Galician for /ŋ/ .

N-: used in Piedmontese and Ligurian for /ŋ/ between two vowels.

NN: used in Leonese for /ɲ/,

NY: used in Catalan for /ɲ/.

QU: represents [kw] in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, and Romansh; [k] in French, Astur-leonese and Spanish (normally before e or i); [k] (before e or i) or [kw] (normally before a or o) in Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese.

RR: used between vowels in several languages (Occitan, Catalan, Spanish...) to denote a trilled /r/ or a guttural R, instead of the flap /ɾ/.

SC: used before E or I in Italian and Romance languages in Italy for /ʃ/, and in French, Portuguese, Catalan and American Spanish as /s/ in words of certain etymology (notice this would be /θ/ in standard peninsular Spanish)

SCH: used in Romansh for [ʃ] or [ʒ].

SCI: used in Italian and Romance languages in Italy to represent /ʃ/ before A, O, or U.

SH: used in Aranese Occitan for /ʃ/.

SS: used in French, Portuguese, Piedmontese, Romansh, Occitan, and Catalan for /s/ between vowels.

TS: used in Catalan for /ts/.

TG: used in Romansh for [c] or [tɕ]. In Catalan is used for /dʒ/ before E and I, as in metge or fetge.

TH: used in Jèrriais for /θ/; used in Aranese for either /t/ or /tʃ/.

TJ: used between vowels and before A, O or U, in Catalan for /dʒ/, as in sotjar or mitjó.

TSCH: used in Romansh for [tʃ].

TX: used at the beginning or at the end of word or between vowels in Catalan for /tʃ/, as in txec, esquitx or atxa.

TZ: used in Catalan for /dz/.

While the digraphs CH, PH, RH and TH were at one time used in many words of Greek origin, most languages have now replaced them with C/QU, F, R and T. Only French has kept these etymological spellings, which now represent /k/ or /ʃ/, /f/, /ʀ/ and /t/, respectively.

Double consonants

Gemination, in the languages where it occurs, is usually indicated by doubling the consonant, except when it does not contrast phonemically with the corresponding short consonant, in which case gemination is not indicated. In Jèrriais, long consonants are marked with an apostrophe: S'S is a long /zz/, SS'S is a long /ss/, and T'T is a long /tt/. The double consonants in French orthography, however, are merely etymological. In Catalan, the gemination of the l is marked by a punt volat = flying point – l·l.

Diacritics

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

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

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

Vowel quality: the system of marking close-mid vowels with an acute, é, and open-mid vowels with a grave accent, è, is widely used (in Catalan, French, Italian, etc.) Portuguese, however, uses the circumflex (ê) for the former, and the acute (é), for the latter.
Nasality: Portuguese marks nasal vowels with a tilde (ã) when they occur before other written vowels and in some other instances. While not frequent among the other Romance languages, the use of this symbol generally to indicate nasality has been incorporated in the orthographies of many South American indigenous languages (Guarani is an example).
Palatalization: some historical palatalizations are indicated with the cedilla (ç) in French, Catalan, Occitan and Portuguese. In Spanish and several other world languages influenced by it, the grapheme ñ represents a palatal nasal consonant. In Romanian some palatalized consonants are indicated with i [ʲ], same as Russian do with "e" and "и".
Diaeresis: when a vowel and another letter that would normally be combined into a digraph with a single sound are exceptionally pronounced apart, this is often indicated with a diaeresis mark on the vowel. In the Spanish word pingüino (penguin), the letter u is pronounced, although normally it is silent in the digraph gu when this is followed by an e or an i. Other Romance languages that use the diaeresis in this fashion are French, Catalan and Occitan. Brazilian Portuguese is no longer adopting diaeresis since its last orthographic reform of 2009.
Stress: the stressed vowel in a polysyllabic word may be indicated with the acute, é (in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan), or the grave accent, è (Italian, Catalan, Romansh). The orthographies of French and Romanian do not mark stress. In Italian and Romansh orthography, indicating stress with a diacritic is only required when it falls on the last syllable of a word.
Homophones: words that are pronounced exactly or nearly the same way, but have different meanings, can be differentiated by a diacritic. An acute accent, for example, is used in Spanish to distinguish si ("if") from sí ("yes"), and in Catalan to distinguish os ("bone") from ós ("bear"). A grave accent is used in French to distinguish ou ("or") from où ("where"); in Italian and Romansh to distinguish e ("and") from è ("is"); and in Catalan to distinguish mà ("hand") from ma ("my"). The circumflex can also have this function in French, sometimes. Often, such words are monosyllables, the accented one being phonetically stressed, while the unaccented one is a clitic; examples are the Spanish clitics de, se, and te (a preposition and two personal pronouns), versus the stressed words dé, sé, and té (two verbs and a noun).

Less widespread diacritics in the Romance languages are the breve (in Romanian, ă) and the ring (in Wallon and the Bolognese dialect of Emiliano-Romagnolo, å). The French orthography includes the etymological ligatures œ and (more rarely) æ. The use of the circumflex in French is partly etymological as well.

Upper and lower case

Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "cases" of the alphabet: majuscule ("uppercase" or "capital letters"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and minuscule ("lowercase"), derived from Carolingian writing and Medieval quill pen handwriting which were later adapted by printers in the 15th and 16th centuries.

In particular, all Romance languages presently capitalize (use uppercase for the first letter of) the following words: the first word of each complete sentence, most words in names of people, places, and organizations, and most words in titles of books. The Romance languages do not follow the German practice of capitalizing all nouns including common ones. Unlike English, the names of months, days of the weeks, and derivatives of proper nouns are usually not capitalized: thus, in Italian one capitalizes Francia ("France") and Francesco ("Francis"), but not francese ("French") or francescano ("Franciscan"). However, each language has some exceptions to this general rule.

Vocabulary comparison

The tables below provide a vocabulary comparison that illustrates a number of examples of sound shifts that have occurred between Latin and Romance languages, along with a selection of minority languages.

Latin	Sardinian	Italian	Sicilian	Romanian	Friulian	Piedmontese	Romansh	French	Occitan	Catalan	Aragonese	Spanish	Ladino	Asturian	Mirandese	Galician	Portuguese	Venetian	Lombard	Emilian	English
Latin	Sardinian	Italian	Sicilian^[28]^[29]	Romanian	Friulian^[30]	Piedmontese	Romansh	French	Occitan^[31]	Catalan	Aragonese	Spanish	Ladino	Asturian	Mirandese^[32]	Galician	Portuguese	Venetian	Lombard	Emilian	English
aquam	abba	acqua	acqua	apǎ	aghe	eva	aua	eau	aiga	aigua	augua	agua	agua	agua	auga	auga	água	aqua	aqua	âcua	water
altum	artu	alto	autu	în-alt	alt	àut	aut	haut^[33]	n-aut	alt	alto	alto	alto	altu	alto	alto	alto	alto	alt	èlt	high
caballum	caàddu	cavallo	cavaddu	cal	ĉhaval	caval	chaval	cheval	caval	cavall	caballo	caballo	kavayo	caballu	cabalo	cabalo	cavalo	cavaeo	cavall	cavâl	horse
ego	deo	io	iu	eu	jo	i(/mi)^[34]	jau	je	je	jo	yo	yo	yo	yo	you	eu	eu	(mi)^[34]	(mì)^[34]	(mé)^[34]	I
facere	faghere	fare	fari	(a) face	fâ	fé	far	faire	far/fàser	fer	fer	hacer	azer	facer	fazer	facer	fazer	far	fà	fèr	to do
focum	fogu	fuoco	focu	foc	fûc	feu	fieu	feu	fuòc	foc	fuego	fuego	huego	fueu	fuogo	fogo	fogo	fogo	foeugh	fûg	fire
insulam	isula	isola	isula	((insulǎ))^[35]	îsule	ìsola	insla	île	iscla	illa	isla/isola	isla	isola/adá	isla	ilha	illa	ilha	isoea	isola	îsla	island
lactem	latte	latte	latti	lapte	lat	làit	latg	lait	lach	llet	leit	leche	leche	lleche	lheite	leite	leite	late	latt	lât	milk
linguam	limba	lingua	lingua	limbǎ	lenghe	lenga	lingua	langue	lenga	llengua	luenga	lengua	lingua	llingua	lhéngua	lingua	língua	lengoa	lengua	langua	tongue/ language
nostrum	nostru	nostro	nostru	nostru	nestri	nòst	noss	notre	nòstre	nostre	nuestro	nuestro	muestro	nuesu^[36]	nuosso^[36]	noso^[36]	nosso^[36]	nostro	noster	nòster	our
novum	noa	nuovo	novu	nou	gnove	neuv	nov	neuf	nòu	nou	nuebo	nuevo	muevo	nuevu	nuobo	novo	novo	novo	noeuv	nôv	new
pellem	pedde	pelle	peddi	piele	piel	pel	pel	peau	pèl	pell	piel	piel	pyél	piel	piel	pel	pele	pée	pell	pèl	skin
pluviam	pròia/proìda	pioggia	chiuvuta^[37]	ploaie	ploe	pieuva	plievgia	pluie	pluèja	pluja	plebia	lluvia	luvya	lluvia	chuba	chuvia/choiva	chuva	piova	pioeuva	piôva	rain
trēs	tres	tre	tri	trei	tre	tre	trais	trois	tres	tres	tres	tres	tres	trés	trés	tres	três	tre	trii	trî (m)/ trai (f)	three

Bibliography

Holtus, Günter/Metzeltin, Michael/Schmitt, Christian: Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik. (LRL) Niemeyer, Tübingen 1988–2005 (12 volumes).
Lindenbauer, Petrea/Metzeltin, Michael/Thir, Margit: Die romanischen Sprachen. Eine einführende Übersicht. G. Egert, Wilhelmsfeld 1995.
Metzeltin, Michael: Las lenguas románicas estándar. Historia de su formación y de su uso. Academia de la Llingua Asturiana, Uviéu 2004.

References

^ [M. Paul Lewis, Ethnologue: Languages of the World Sixteenth Edition http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size]
^ Ilari, Rodolfo (2002). Lingüística Românica. Ática. p. 50. ISBN 85-08-04250-7.
^ Vasile Breban (1973). Limba română corectă: Probleme de ortografie, gramatică, lexic. Editura științifică. p. 68. "In constructions with "înainte de" (before), the infinitive is recommended over the conjunctive. So it is correct to say "Înainte de a sosi trenul" or (with the short infinitive) "Înainte de sosirea trenului" instead of "Înainte să sosească trenul" (conjunctive)."
^ 1993 Statistical Abstract of Israel reports 250,000 speakers of Romanian in Israel, while the 1995 census puts the total figure of the Israeli population at 5,548,523
^ "Reports of about 300,000 Jews who left the country after WW2". Eurojewcong.org. http://www.eurojewcong.org/ejc/news.php?id_article=110. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
^ "Encarta Dictionary". Microsoft Encarta 2006. http://uk.encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/dictionaryhome.aspx. Retrieved 2009-11-16.
^ "Ethnologue". SIL Haley. http://www.ethnologue.org/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size.
^ "Sardos etiam, qui non Latii sunt sed Latiis associandi videntur, eiciamus, quoniam soli sine proprio vulgari esse videntur, gramaticam tanquam simie homines imitantes: nam domus nova et dominus meus locuntur." ("Let us ignore the Sards, then, who are not Latins but appear to be associated with them, because they alone seem to lack their own common tongue, rather imitating (Latin) grammar as monkeys do men: For they say 'domus nova' and 'dominus meus'.") It is unclear whether this indicates that Sardinian still had a two-case system at the time; modern Sardinian lacks grammatical case.
^ Note the palatalization in masculine amici /aˈmitʃi/ but lack of palatalization in amiche /aˈmike/; this proves that feminine -e cannot come from Latin AE, which became /ɛː/ by the first-century AD and would certainly have triggered palatalization.
^ Modern Latin
^ "Eall fhoil de Bhreathanach". Archived from the original on June 10, 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080610171257/http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/lang/breath.html.
^ Henrik Theiling (2007-10-28). "Þrjótrunn: A North Romance Language: History". Kunstsprachen.de. http://www.kunstsprachen.de/s17/s_02.html. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
^ "Relay 10/R – Jelbazech". Steen.free.fr. 2004-08-28. http://steen.free.fr/relay10/jelbazech.html. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
^ /ǝ/ can occur only in unstressed syllables, and it tends to be rounded [ɵ̞]; it is replaced by [ø] when stressed.
^ /ɐ/ developed as the allophone of /a/ before nasals and under low stress, and the two are still nearly in complementary distribution. A few minimal pairs like falamos /fɐˈlɐmuʃ/ "we speak" vs. falámos /fɐˈlamuʃ/ "we spoke" seem to clearly indicate that /ɐ/ must be a phoneme, but other analyses are possible. /ɨ/, which developed from earlier /e/ in unstressed syllables, is even more doubtful.
^ Henri Wittmann. "Le français de Paris dans le français des Amériques."PDF (52.1 KB), Proceedings of the International Congress of Linguists 16.0416 (Paris, 20–25 juillet 1997). Oxford: Pergamon (CD edition).
^ ipse originally meant "self", as in ego ipse or egomet ipse "I myself". ipse later shifted to mean "the" (still reflected in Sardinian and in the Catalan spoken in the Balearic Islands), and still later came to be a demonstrative pronoun. From -met ipse the emphatic (superlative) form metipsimum was created, later evolving into medisimum and eventually Spanish mismo, French même, Italian medesimo, which replaced both Latin ipse "self" and idem "same". The alternative form metipse eventually produced Catalan mateix, Old Portuguese medês. The normal Italian equivalent, however, is stesso, derived from the combination iste-ipse.
^ magnum also survives in Spanish tamaño, Portuguese tamanho "size" < tam magnum "so big".
^ Notice the current Portuguese spelling (Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990) abolished the use of the diaeresis for this purpose.
^ Pope (1934).
^ Allen (2003) states: "There appears to have been no great difference in quality between long and short a, but in the case of the close and mid vowels (i and u, e and o) the long appear to have been appreciably closer than the short." He then goes on to the historical development, quotations from various authors (from around the 2nd century AD), as well as evidence from older inscriptions where "e" stands for normally short i, and "i" for long e, etc.
^ Technically, Sardinian is one of the Southern Romance languages. The same vowel outcome occurred in a small strip running across southern Italy (the Lausberg Zone), and is thought to have formerly occurred in the Romance languages of northern Africa.
^ Palmer (1954).
^ cauda would produce French *choue, Italian *[cɔda], Occitan *cauza (or similar), Romanian *caudă.
^ Note that the outcome of -am -em -om would be the same regardless of whether lengthening occurred, and that -im was already rare in Classical Latin, and appears to have barely survived in Proto-Romance. The only likely survival is in "-teen" numerals such as trēdecim "thirteen" > Italian tredici. This favors the vowel-lengthening hypothesis -im > /ĩː/ > /i/; but notice unexpected decem > Italian dieci (rather than expected *diece). It is possible that dieci comes from *decim, which analogically replaced decem based on the -decim ending; but it is also possible that the final /i/ in dieci represents an irregular development of some other sort and that the process of analogy worked in the other direction.
^ Formerly ⟨qü⟩ in Brazilian Portuguese
^ Formerly ⟨gü⟩ in Brazilian Portuguese
^ "Sicilian–English Dictionary". Italian.about.com. 2010-06-15. http://italian.about.com/od/sicilian/a/aa050405d_3.htm. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
^ "Dictionary Sicilian – Italian". Utenti.lycos.it. http://www.utenti.lycos.it/uerreclan_sito/dizionario.htm. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
^ "Dictionary English–Friulian Friulian–English". Sangiorgioinsieme.it. http://www.sangiorgioinsieme.it/Diz-friulan-english%20.htm. Retrieved 2011-07-31.
^ Beaumont (2008-12-16). "Occitan–English Dictionary". Freelang.net. http://www.freelang.net/online/occitan.php?lg=gb. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
^ "Translator Portuguese-Mirandese". Student.dei.uc.pt. http://student.dei.uc.pt/~crpires/tradutor/Tradutor.html. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
^ Initial h- due to contamination of Germanic *hauh "high".
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Cognate with Latin mē, not ego.
^ Not a direct inheritance, but a late re-borrowing from Latin (a latinism).
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Developed from an assimilated form *nossum rather than from nostrum.
^ Developed from *pluviūtam.

External links

Romance languages

Western and Italo-Dalmatian

Western

Gallo-Italic

Ligurian	Brigasc · Genoese · Intemelio · Monégasque

Lombard	Eastern · Gallo-Italic of Sicily · Western

Others	Emiliano-Romagnolo · Piedmontese · Judaeo-Piedmontese · Venetian

Gallo-Rhaetian

Langues d'oïl	Burgundian · Champenois · Franc-Comtois · French (Standard · African · Canadian · Old French · Middle French · Judaeo-French · French-based creoles) · Gallo · Lorrain · Norman · Picard · Poitevin · Saintongeais · Walloon

Rhaeto-Romance	Friulian · Ladin · Romansh

Others	Franco-Provençal

Occitano-
Romance

Catalan	Eastern Catalan (Alguerese · Balearic · Central · Northern) · Western Catalan (North-Western · Valencian) · Judaeo-Catalan · Catalan Caló

Occitan	Auvergnat · Gascon (Aranese) · Languedocien · Limousin · Provençal (Niçard · Mentonasc) · Vivaro-Alpine · Old Provençal · Judaeo-Provençal

Ibero-Romance

Astur-Leonese	Asturian · Cantabrian · Extremaduran · Leonese · Mirandese

Galician-Portuguese	Portuguese (European · Brazilian · African · Asian & Oceanian) · Galician (Eonavian) · Fala · Judaeo-Portuguese · Portuguese Calão · Portuguese-based creoles

Spanish (Castilian)	African (Equatoguinean) · American · Asian · Peninsular · Old Spanish · Judaeo-Spanish · Spanish Caló · Spanish-based creoles

Pyrenean	Navarro-Aragonese (Aragonese · Judaeo-Aragonese) · Mozarabic

Italo-Dalmatian

Italian	Central · Corsican (Gallurese) · Sassarese · Tuscan · Judaeo-Italian

Southern Italian	Abruzzese · Apulian · Campanian (Neapolitan) · Lucanian (Northern Calabrese) · Molisan

Others	Dalmatian · Istriot · Sicilian (Southern Calabrese)

Eastern and Sardinian

Eastern

Romanian	Moldovan · Vlach

Others	Aromanian · Istro-Romanian · Megleno-Romanian

Sardinian

—	Campidanese · Logudorese

Italics indicate extinct languages; bold indicates languages with more than 5 million speakers; languages between parentheses are varieties of the language on their left.

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Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

Wikipedia

Romance languages

Contents

Origins

Name

Samples

History

Vulgar Latin

Fall of the Western Roman Empire

Latent incubation

Recognition of the vernaculars

Uniformization and standardization

Modern status

Classification and related languages

Proposed divisions

Gallo-Romance languages

Pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages

Auxiliary and constructed languages

Linguistic features

Basic features

Changes from Classical Latin

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

Lexical stress

Nominal Morphology

Number

Gender

Case

Pronouns, determiners

Personal pronouns

Development from Latin

Clitic pronouns

Familar/formal distinction

Articles

Verbal Morphology

Lexicon

Sound changes

Consonants

Apocope

Palatalization

Lenition

Prosthesis

Stressed vowels

Loss of vowel length, reorientation

Latin diphthongs

Further developments

Metaphony

Diphthongization

Nasalization

Front-rounded vowels

Unstressed vowels

Intertonic vowels

Writing systems

Letters

Digraphs and trigraphs

Double consonants

Diacritics

Upper and lower case

Vocabulary comparison

Bibliography

See also

References

External links

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