All of them descend from the everyday spoken Latin of soldiers, traders and settlers, not from the Latin of the orators
Vulgar Latin — sermo vulgaris, the speech of the crowd
General knowledge · Words & language
The Romance languages
Diverged from Latin c. AD 400–900
Language families — the children of spoken Latin
The languages descended from the everyday spoken Latin of the Roman empire rather than from the literary Latin of Cicero: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, together with Catalan, Galician, Occitan, Sardinian, Romansh, Friulian, Ladin and a scattering of others. They are the one large family whose parent language survives in writing, which makes them the great control experiment of historical linguistics: everything reconstructed elsewhere can here be checked against the documents. Around 900 million people speak one as a first language.
How to spot them
- ▸A family whose parent language we can actually read
- ▸The Oaths of Strasbourg in 842, the first text in the new vernacular
- ▸Sardinian is the most conservative; French the most eroded
- ▸Only one member survives in eastern Europe, and it alone keeps a case system
Key facts
The oaths sworn by two of Charlemagne's grandsons in 842, the earliest surviving text in the new vernacular (842)
The Oaths of Strasbourg, sworn by Louis the German and Charles the Bald
The island language usually reckoned the most conservative of the family, keeping a hard c before e and i
Sardinian — kentu for centum, where Italian has cento
Only one member is spoken in eastern Europe, and it alone keeps a case system and puts its definite article on the end
Romanian
Antonio de Nebrija presented the first grammar of a modern European vernacular to Isabella of Castile in 1492 (1492)
Gramática de la lengua castellana; he told the queen that language was the companion of empire
The Latin word for a horse vanished; the word for a nag replaced it everywhere
Equus gave way to caballus — cheval, caballo, cavallo, cal
Made a national language of Switzerland by referendum in 1938, and an official language in 1996 (1938)
Romansh, spoken in Graubünden
Its last speaker was killed by a landmine explosion on Krk in 1898 (1898)
Dalmatian, and Antonio Udina, known as Burbur
Key ideas
- The family shows what happens to a case system when final consonants weaken. Latin's noun endings wore away, so word order hardened and prepositions took over the work; the demonstrative ille became the definite article, and habere plus a participle became the perfect tense.
Quick-fire facts
- •Around 900 million people speak a Romance language natively; Spanish and Portuguese are the largest
- •The name is from the Latin adverb romanice, 'in the Roman manner'
- •The family is the best-attested case of a proven proto-language, since Latin survives in quantity
- •The Oaths of Strasbourg of 842 are the earliest text in Old French
- •The Indovinello veronese, of about 800, and the Placiti Cassinesi of 960 are among the earliest Italian texts
- •Romanian keeps three cases and attaches its definite article to the end of the noun; it also has many Slavic loanwords
- •French lost most of its final consonants and developed nasal vowels, making it the least conservative of the major members
- •Nebrija's Castilian grammar of 1492 was the first of any modern European vernacular
- •Romansh became Switzerland's fourth national language by referendum in 1938 and an official language, for dealings with Romansh speakers, in 1996
- •Dalmatian died out with Antonio Udina, killed in an explosion on the island of Krk on 10 June 1898
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Sources
- Rebecca Posner — The Romance Languages
- Martin Maiden, John Charles Smith and Adam Ledgeway — The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages