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Romance
Geographic distribution	French  Italian  Spanish  Portuguese  Romanian  Catalan
Linguistic classification	Indo-European Italic Latino-Faliscan Romance
Subdivisions	Sardinian Eastern Romance Western Romance (orItalo-Western)
Language codes
Glottolog	roma1334

The internalclassification of theRomance languages is a complex and sometimes controversial topic which may not have one single answer. Several classifications have been proposed, based on different criteria.

Thecomparative method used by linguists to build family language trees is based on the assumption that the member languages evolved from a singleproto-language by a sequence of binary splits, separated by many centuries. With that hypothesis, and theglottochronological assumption that the degree of linguistic change is roughly proportional to elapsed time, the sequence of splits can be deduced by measuring the differences between the members.

However, the history of Romance languages, as we know it, makes the first assumption rather problematic. While theRoman Empire lasted, its educational policies and the natural mobility of its soldiers and administrative officials probably ensured some degree of linguistic homogeneity throughout its territory. Even if there were differences between theVulgar Latin spoken in different regions, it is doubtful whether there were any sharp boundaries between the various dialects. On the other hand, after theEmpire's collapse, the population ofLatin speakers was separated—almost instantaneously, by the standards ofhistorical linguistics—into a large number of politically independent states and feudal domains whose populations were largely bound to the land. These units then interacted, merged and split in various ways over the next fifteen centuries, possibly influenced by languages external to the family (as in the so-calledBalkan language area).

In summary, thehistory of Latin and Romance-speaking peoples can hardly be described by a binary branching pattern; therefore, one may argue that any attempt to fit the Romance languages into a tree structure is inherently flawed.^[1] In this regard, the genealogical structure of languages forms a typicallinkage.^[2]

On the other hand, the tree structure may be meaningfully applied to any subfamilies of Romance whose members did diverge from a common ancestor by binary splits. That may be the case, for example, of the dialects of Spanish and Portuguese spoken in different countries, or the regional variants of spokenstandard Italian (but not the so-called "Italian dialects", which are distinct languages that evolved directly from Vulgar Latin).

The two main avenues to attempt classifications are historical and typological criteria:^[3]

• Historical criteria look at the Romance languages' former development. For example, a widely employed model divided the Romance-speaking world between West and East based on whether plural nouns end in -s or in a vowel. Researchers have highlighted this is mainly valid from a historical point of view as the change appeared in Antiquity in the East (Italo-Romance, Dalmatian and Eastern Romance), while in the West plural nouns ending in -s were preserved past this stage but could be lost by more recent changes (such as aspiration of word-final -s in some varieties of Spanish and its phonetic loss in French).^[4] Another criterion taken into account is the distinction betweenconservative andinnovative/progressive Romance languages. Generally, theGallo-Romance languages (discussed further below) form the core "innovative" languages, with standard French often considered the most innovative of all. The phenomenon is attributed to language development in theCarolingian Empire with Northern Italy and Catalan region representing marginal areas of distribution. For example, Catalan, up to the thirteenth century, used the Romance writing modes common in the Occitan area. This created a contrast with the languages near the periphery (which include Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian) which are deemed as "conservative".^[5]Sardinian is generally acknowledged as the most conservative Romance languages, at least from a phonetic point of view.Dante famously denigrated theSardinians for the conservativeness of their speech, remarking that they imitate Latin "like monkeys imitate men".^[6][7] According to Gerhard Rohlfs France replaced Italy as a centre of diffusion of innovations around the sixth century.^[8]
• Typological criteria measure the structural features of Romance languages, mainly in synchrony. For example, the identification of theLa Spezia–Rimini Line line, which is generally accepted as the main isogloss for consonantallenition in Romance languages and which runs across north-central Italy just to the north of the city ofFlorence (whose speech forms the basis of standard Italian). In this scheme, "East" includes the languages of central and southern Italy, and theEastern Romance languages in Romania, Greece, and elsewhere in the Balkans; "West" includes the languages of Portugal, Spain, France, northern Italy and Switzerland.^[9]Sardinian does not fit at all into this sort of division.^[10] Further expansions on this are discussed below.

By applying the comparative method, some linguists have concluded that Sardinian became linguistically developed separately from the remainder of the Romance languages at an extremely early date.^[11] Among the many distinguishing features of Sardinian are its articles (derived from LatinIPSE instead ofILLE) and lack of palatalization of/k/ and/ɡ/ before/ieɛ/^[12] and other unique conservations such asdomo ‘house’ (<domo).^[13] Sardinian has plurals in /s/ but post-vocalic lenition of voiceless consonants is normally limited to the status of an allophonic rule, which ignores word boundaries (e.g. [k]ane 'dog' butsu [ɡ]ane orsu [ɣ]ane 'the dog'), and there are a few innovations unseen elsewhere, such as a change of /au/ to /a/.^[14] This view is challenged in part by the existence of definite articles continuingipse forms (e.g.sa mar 'the sea') in some varieties ofCatalan, best known as typical ofBalearic dialects. Sardinian also shares develarisation of earlier /kw/ and /ɡw/ with Romanian: Sard.abba, Rom.apă 'water'; Sard.limba, Rom.limbă 'language' (cf. Italianacqua,lingua).

According to this view, the next split was betweenCommon Romanian in the east, and the other languages (theItalo-Western languages) in the west. One of the characteristic features of Romanian is its retention of three of Latin's seven noun cases. The third major split was more evenly divided, between the Italian branch, which comprises many languages spoken in theItalian Peninsula, and the Gallo-Iberian branch.

However, this is not the only view. Another common classification begins by splitting the Romance languages into two main branches, East and West. The East group includes Romanian, the languages ofCorsica andSardinia,^[9] and alllanguages of Italy south of a line through the cities ofRimini andLa Spezia (seeLa Spezia–Rimini Line). Languages in this group are said to be more conservative, i.e. they retained more features of the original Latin.

The West group split into aGallo-Romance group, which became theOïl languages (including French),Gallo-Italian, Occitan,Franco-Provençal andRomansh, and anIberian Romance group which became Spanish and Portuguese.

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

Italo-Western is in turn split along the so-calledLa Spezia–Rimini Line in northern Italy,^[15] which is a bundle ofisoglosses separating the central and southern Italian languages from the so-calledWestern Romance languages to the north and west. Some noteworthy differences between the two are:

• Phonemiclenition of intervocalic stops, which happens to the northwest but not to the southeast.
• Degemination of geminate stops (producing new intervocalic single 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.

Recent scholarship argues for a more nuanced view. 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 yet theGallo-Italic languages are somewhere in between. These languages do have the "northwest" characteristics of lenition and loss of gemination however other seemingly clear boundaries are often obscured by local variations:^[16]

• The Gallo‒Italic languages have vowel-changing plurals rather than /s/ plurals.
• TheLombard language in north-central Italy and the Rhaeto-Romance languages have the "southeast" characteristic of/tʃ/ instead of/(t)s/ for palatalized /k/.
• TheVenetian language in northeast Italy and some of the Rhaeto-Romance languages have the "southeast" characteristic of developing/kt/ to/tt/.
• Lenition of post-vocalic /p t k/ is widespread as an allophonic phonetic realization in Italy below the La Spezia-Rimini line, including Corsica and most of Sardinia.

The likely cause for this partition is that the focal point of innovation was located in central France and was related directly to the level of Carolingian influence, from which a series of innovations spread out asareal changes. TheLa Spezia–Rimini Line would then represent the farthest point to the southeast that these innovations reached, corresponding to the northern chain of theApennine 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 extensively than other Western Romance languages.^[17]

On top of this, the medievalMozarabic language in southern Spain, at the far end of the "northwest" group, may have had the "southeast" characteristics of lack of lenition and palatalization of /k/ to/tʃ/.^[18] Certain languages around thePyrenees (e.g. some highlandAragonese dialects) also lack lenition, and northern French dialects such asNorman andPicard have palatalization of /k/ to/tʃ/ (although this is possibly an independent, secondary development, since /k/ between vowels, i.e. when subject to lenition, developed to /dz/ rather than/dʒ/, as would be expected for a primary development).^[19]

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/. This has led some researchers, followingWalther von Wartburg, to postulate a basic two-way east–west division, with the "Eastern" languages including Romanian and central and southern Italian, although this view is troubled by the contrast of numerous Romanian phonological developments with those found in Italy below the La Spezia-Rimini line. Among these features, in Romanian geminates reduced historically to single units, and /kt/ developed into /pt/, whereas in central and southern Italy geminates are preserved and /kt/ underwent assimilation to /tt/.^[20]

Linguists like Jean-Pierre Chambon claim that the various regional languages did not evolve in isolation from their neighbours; on the contrary, they see many changes propagating from the more central regions (Italy and France) towards the periphery (Iberian Peninsula and Romania).^[21] These authors see the Romance family as alinkage rather than a tree-like family, and insist that theWave model is better suited than theTree model for representing the history of Romance.

A 1949 study by the Italian-American linguistMario Pei, analyzing the degree to which seven Romance languages diverged from Classical Latin with respect to their accented vowels, yielded the following measurements of divergence (with higher percentages indicating greater divergence from the stressed vowels of Classical Latin):^[22][23]

• Logudorese Sardinian: 8%
• Italian: 12%
• Spanish: 20%
• Romanian: 23.5%
• Occitan: 25%
• Portuguese: 31%
• French: 44%

The study emphasized, however, that it represented only "a very elementary, incomplete and tentative demonstration" of how statistical methods could measure linguistic change, assigned "frankly arbitrary" point values to various types of change, and did not compare languages in the sample with respect to any characteristics or forms of divergence other than stressed vowels, among other caveats.^[24]

Part of the difficulties met in classifying Romance languages is due to the seemingly messy distribution of linguistic innovations across members of the Romance family. While this is a problem for followers of the dominantTree model, this is in fact a characteristic typical oflinkages anddialect continuums generally: this has been an argument for approaching this family with the tools based on theWave model, includingdialectology andHistorical glottometry.

What follows is a sample of some significant linguistic traits (innovations since Vulgar Latin) that run across the Romance linkage.

The differences among Romance languages occur at all levels, including the sound systems, the orthography, the nominal, verbal, and adjectival inflections, the auxiliary verbs and the semantics of verbal tenses, the function words, the rules for subordinate clauses, and, especially, in their vocabularies. While most of those differences are clearly due to independent development after the breakup of the Roman Empire (including invasions and cultural exchanges), one must also consider the influence of prior languages in territories of Latin Europe that fell under Roman rule, and possibleheterogeneity in Vulgar Latin itself.

Romanian, together with other related languages, likeAromanian, has a number of grammatical features which are unique within Romance, but are shared with other non-Romance languages of theBalkans, such asAlbanian,Bulgarian,Greek,Macedonian,Serbo-Croatian andTurkish. These include, for example, the structure of the vestigial case system, the placement of articles as suffixes of the nouns (cer = "sky",cerul = "the sky"), and several more. This phenomenon, called theBalkan language area, may be due to contacts between those languages in post-Roman times.

Some Romance languages form plurals by adding/s/ (derived from the plural of the Latin accusative case), while others form the plural by changing the final vowel (by influence of Latin nominative plural endings, such as/i/) from some masculine nouns.

• Plural in/s/: Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan,^[25] Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian, Romansh.
  • Special case of French: Falls into the first group historically (and orthographically), but the final-s is no longer pronounced (except inliaison contexts), meaning that singular and plural nouns are usually homophonous in isolation. Manydeterminers have a distinct plural formed by both changing the vowel and allowing/z/ in liaison.
• Vowel change: Italian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Romanian.

Some Romance languages use a version of Latinplus, others a version ofmagis.

• Plus-derived: Frenchplus/plys/, Italianpiù/pju/, Sardinianprus/ˈpruzu/, Piedmontesepi, Lombardpu, Ligurianciù, Neapolitanchiù, Friulianplui, Romanshpli, Venetianpi. In Catalanpus/pus/ is exclusively used in negative statements in the Mallorcan dialect, and "més" is the word mostly used.
• Magis-derived: Galician and Portuguese (mais; medievalGalician-Portuguese had both words:mais andchus), Spanish (más), Catalan (més), Venetian (massa ormasa, "too much") Occitan (mai), Romanian (mai).

Although the Classical Latin word for "nothing" isnihil, the common word for "nothing" becamenulla in Italian (from neuter pluralnulla, "no thing",^[26] or fromnulla res;^[27] Italian also has the word "niente"),nudda[ˈnuɖːa] in Sardinian,nada in Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician (from(rem) natam, "thing born";^[28] Galician also has the word "ren"),rien in French,res in Catalan,cosa andres in Aragonese,ren in Occitan (fromrem, "thing",^[29] or else from nominativeres),^[30]nimic in Romanian,nagut in Romansh,gnente in Venetian and Piedmontese,gnent andnagott in Lombard, andnue andnuie in Friulian. Some argue that most roots derive from different parts of a Latin phrasenullam rem natam ("no thing born"), an emphatic idiom for "nothing".^{[citation needed]} Meanwhile, Italian and Venetianniente andgnente would seem to be more logically derived from Latinne(c) entem ("no being"),ne inde or, more likely,ne(c) (g)entem, which also explains the French cognate wordnéant.^[31][32] The Piedmontese negative adverbnen also comes directly fromne(c) (g)entem,^[27] whilegnente is borrowed from Italian.

Romanian constructs the names of the numbers 11–19 by a regular Slavic-influenced pattern that could be translated as "one-over-ten", "two-over-ten", etc. All the other Romance languages use a pattern like "one-ten", "two-ten", etc. for 11–15, and the pattern "ten-and-seven, "ten-and-eight", "ten-and-nine" for 17–19. For 16, however, they split into two groups: some use "six-ten", some use "ten-and-six":^[33]

• "Sixteen": Italiansedici, Catalan and Occitansetze, Frenchseize, Venetiansédexe, Romanshsedesch, Friuliansedis, Lombardsedas / sedes, Franco-Provençalsèze, Sardiniansèighi, Piedmontesesëddes (sëddes is borrowed from Lombard and replaced the originalsëzze since the 18th century, such as the numbers from 11 to 16,onze but nowóndes,dose but nowdódes,trëzze but nowtërdes,quatòrze but nowquatòrdes,quinze but nowquìndes).
• "Ten and six": Portuguesedezasseis ordezesseis, Galiciandezaseis (decem ac sex), Spanishdieciséis (Romance construction:diez y seis), the Marchigiano dialectdigissei.
• "Six over ten": Romanianșaisprezece (wherespre derives fromLatinsuper).

Classical Latin uses the "one-ten" pattern for 11–17 (ūndecim,duodecim, ...,septendecim), but then switches to "two-off-twenty" (duodēvīgintī) and "one-off-twenty" (ūndēvīgintī). For the sake of comparison, note that many of theGermanic languages use two special words derived from "one left over" and "two left over" for 11 and 12, then the pattern "three-ten", "four-ten", ..., "nine-ten" for 13–19.

The verbs derived from Latinhabēre "to have",tenēre "to hold", andesse "to be" are used differently in the various Romance languages, to express possession, to construct perfect tenses, and to makeexistential statements ("there is").^[34][35] If we useT fortenēre,H forhabēre, andE foresse, we have the following distribution:

• HHE: Romanian, Italian, Gallo-Italic languages.
• HHH: Occitan, French, Romansh, Sardinian.
• THH: Spanish, Catalan, Aragonese.
• T-H/T-T: Portuguese.

For example:

Ancient Galician-Portuguese used to employ the auxiliaryH for permanent states, such asEu hei um nome "I have a name" (i.e. for all my life), andT for non-permanent statesEu tenho um livro "I have a book" (i.e. perhaps not so tomorrow), but this construction is no longer used in modern Galician and Portuguese.Portuguese also uses theT verb even in the existential sense, e.g.Tem água no copo "There is water in the glass". Sardinian employs bothH andE for existential statements, with different degrees of determination.

Languages that have notgrammaticalised *tenēre have kept it with its original sense "hold", e.g. Italiantieni il libro, Frenchtu tiens le livre, Romanianține cartea, FriulianTu tu tegnis il libri "You're holding the book". The meaning of "hold" is also retained to some extent in Spanish and Catalan.

Romansh uses, besidesigl ha, the formi dat (literally: it gives),calqued from Germanes gibt.

Some languages use their equivalent of 'have' as anauxiliary verb to form the compound forms (e. g. Frenchpassé composé) of all verbs; others use 'be' for some verbs and 'have' for others.

• 'have' only: Standard Catalan, Spanish, Romanian, Sicilian.
• 'have' and 'be': Occitan, French, Sardinian, Italian, Northern-Italian languages (Piedmontese, Lombard, Ligurian, Venetian, Friulan), Romansh, Central Italian languages (Tuscan, Umbrian, Corsican) some Catalan dialects (although such usage is recessing in those).

In the latter type, the verbs which use 'be' as an auxiliary areunaccusative verbs, that is, intransitive verbs that often show motion not directly initiated by the subject or changes of state, such as 'fall', 'come', 'become'. All other verbs (intransitiveunergative verbs and all transitive verbs) use 'have'. For example, in French,J'ai vu or Italianho visto 'I have seen' vs.Je suis tombé,sono caduto 'I have (lit. am) fallen'. Note, however, the difference between French and Italian in the choice of auxiliary for the verb 'be' itself: Fr.J'ai été 'I have been' with 'have', but Italiansono stato with 'be'. In Southern Italian languages the principles governing auxiliaries can be quite complex, including even differences in persons of the subject. A similar distinction exists in the Germanic languages, which share alanguage area^{[citation needed]}; German, Dutch, Danish and Icelandic use 'have' and 'be', while English, Norwegian and Swedish use 'have' only (although in modern English, 'be' remains in certain relic phrases:Christ is risen,Joy to the world: the Lord is come).

"Be" is also used for reflexive forms of the verbs, as in Frenchj'ai lavé 'I washed [something]', butje me suis lavé 'I washed myself', Italianho lavato 'I washed [something]' vs.mi sono lavato 'I washed myself'.

Tuscan usessi forms identical to the 3rd person reflexive in a usage interpreted as 'we' subject, triggering 'be' as auxiliary in compound constructions, with the subject pronounnoi 'we' optional. If the verb employed is one that otherwise selects 'have' as auxiliary, the past participle is unmarked:si è lavorato =abbiamo lavorato 'we (have) worked'. If the verb is one that otherwise selects 'be', the past participle is marked plural:si è arrivati =siamo arrivati 'we (have) arrived'.

• Boula de Mareüil, Philippe; Evrard, Marc; François, Alexandre; Romano, Antonio (2025)."Computer modelling of innovations relative to Latin in contemporary Romance dialects"(PDF). In Russo, Michela; Ulfsbjorninn, Shanti (eds.).Romance minority languages: A challenge for linguistic theory. Isogloss. pp. 1–32.
• Chambon, Jean-Pierre. 2011. Note sur la diachronie du vocalisme accentué en istriote/istroroman et sur la place de ce groupe de parlers au sein de la branche romane.Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 106.1: 293-303.
• François, Alexandre (2014),"Trees, Waves and Linkages: Models of Language Diversification"(PDF), in Bowern, Claire; Evans, Bethwyn (eds.),The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, London: Routledge, pp. 161–189,ISBN 978-0-41552-789-7.
• Kalyan, Siva; François, Alexandre (2018),"Freeing the Comparative Method from the tree model: A framework for Historical Glottometry"(PDF), in Kikusawa, Ritsuko; Reid, Laurie (eds.),Let's talk about trees: Tackling Problems in Representing Phylogenic Relationships among Languages, Senri Ethnological Studies, 98, Ōsaka: National Museum of Ethnology, pp. 59–89.
• Italica: Bulletin of the American Association of Teachers of Italian. Vol. 27–29. Menasha, Wisconsin:George Banta Publishing Company. 1950. RetrievedNovember 18, 2013.
• Koutna, Olga (December 31, 1990)."Chapter V. Renaissance: On the History of Classifications in the Romance Language Group". In Niederehe, Hans-Josef; Koerner, E.F.K. (eds.).History and Historiography of Linguistics: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS IV), Trier, 24–28 August 1987. Vol. 1: Antiquitity&#32, &#91,sic&#93, –17th Century. Amsterdam, the Netherlands / Philadelphia, PA:John Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 294.ISBN 9027278113. RetrievedNovember 18, 2013.
• Penny, Ralph (2000).Variation and Change in Spanish. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-78045-4.
• Wright, Roger (2013). "Periodization". In Maiden, Martin; Smith, John Charles; Ledgeway, Adam (eds.).The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages: Volume 2. pp. 107–124.doi:10.1017/CHO9781139019996.ISBN 978-1-139-01999-6.

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