| Western Romance | |
|---|---|
| Gallo-Iberian[note 1] | |
| Geographic distribution | France,Iberia,Northern Italy, andSwitzerland |
| Linguistic classification | Indo-European
|
Early forms | |
| Subdivisions |
|
| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | west2813 |
 Classification of Romance languages | |
Western Romance languages are one of the two subdivisions of a proposed subdivision of theRomance languages based on theLa Spezia–Rimini Line. They include theIbero-Romance andGallo-Romance.Gallo-Italic may also be included. The subdivision is based mainly on the use of the "s" for pluralization, the weakening of some consonants and the pronunciation of "Soft C" as/t͡s/ (often later/s/) rather than/t͡ʃ/ as in Italian and Romanian.
Based onmutual intelligibility, Dalby counts thirteen languages:Portuguese,Spanish,Asturleonese,Aragonese,Catalan,Gascon,Provençal,Gallo-Wallon,French,Franco-Provençal,Romansh,Ladin andFriulian.[2]
Some classifications includeItalo-Dalmatian; the resulting clade is generally calledItalo-Western Romance. Other classifications place Italo-Dalmatian withEastern Romance.
Sardinian does not fit into either Western or Eastern Romance, having split off earlier than the two.[citation needed]
Today the four most widely spoken standardized Western Romance languages areSpanish (c. 486 million native speakers, around 125 million second-language speakers),Portuguese (c. 220 million native, another 45 million or so second-language speakers, mainly inLusophone Africa),French (c. 80 million native speakers, another 70 million or so second-language speakers, mostly in Francophone Africa), andCatalan (c. 7.2 million native). Many of these languages have large numbers of non-native speakers; this is especially the case for French, in widespread use throughoutWest Africa as alingua franca.
Gallo-Romance includes:
Gallo-Romance can include:
The Oïl languages, Arpitan and Rhaeto-Romance languages are sometimes called Gallo-Rhaetian, but it is difficult to exclude from this group Gallo-Italic, which according to several linguists forms a particular unity with Rhaeto-Romance.[5]
Iberian Romance languages of theIberian Peninsula include:[6]
Sometimes considered a subgroup of the previous groups, it constitutes a group of languages that do not have all the Gallo-Romance traits nor the Ibero-Romance traits. The list is as follows:
