Romance languages

Table of Contents

Introduction & Top Questions
General considerations
- Origins and distribution
- Classification methods and problems
Languages of the family
Latin and the development of the Romance languages
- Latin and the protolanguage
- The postclassical period
  - The emergence of Romance
  - The language of religion and culture
  - Latin in non-Romance languages
- The development of the Romance languages
  - Romance glosses to Latin texts
  - The beginning of Romance literature
  - The standardization of the Romance languages
Linguistic characteristics of the Romance languages
- Typology
- Phonology
  - Vowels
  - Consonants
- Grammar
  - The reduction of inflectional endings
  - The loss of the case system
  - The emergence of articles
  - The survival of verbal inflection
- Syntax
  - The reduction of the subjunctive
  - Conditional clauses
- Morphology
- Vocabulary
  - Latin inheritance
  - Pre-Romance borrowings
  - Later Latin borrowings
  - Vocabulary variations
Orthography

References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics

Images

Romance languages

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Indo-European languages in contemporary Eurasia

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Romance languages summary

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Romance languages: Facts & Related Content

Written and fact-checked by The Information Architects of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Facts

Also Known As	Romanic languages

Photos

Romance languages

French language distribution

Spanish language

Italic languages

Indo-European languages in contemporary Eurasia

See All Images →

Topics

Italian language French language Spanish language Romanian language Rhaetian dialects Sardinian language Catalan language Portuguese language Occitan language Ladino language Greek language Slavic languages Celtic languages Baltic languages Germanic languages Indo-Iranian languages Armenian language Albanian language Tocharian languages Indo-Hittite languages

Key People

Erich Auerbach

American scholar

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François-Juste-Marie Raynouard

French dramatist

Friedrich Christian Diez

German scholar

Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke

Swiss-German linguist

Jakob Jud

Swiss linguist

Charles Hall Grandgent

American linguist

Quiz

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Languages & Alphabets