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{{Infobox Language family|name = Romance|region = Spanish languageFrench languagePortuguese languageItalian languageRomanian language|familycolor = Indo-European|fam1 = Indo-European languages|fam2 = Italic languages|child1 = Italo-Western languages|child2 = Eastern Romance languages|child3 = Southern Romance languages|iso2=roa-->The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European languages that comprisies all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. They have more than 700 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, as well as many smaller regions scattered throughout the world.

All Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of soldiers, settlers and merchants of the Empire, which was significantly different from the Classical Latin of the Roman literati. Between 200 BC and AD 150, the expansion of the Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language over an area spanning from the Iberian Peninsula to the Western coast of the Black Sea, and from the Maghreb to Britannia. During the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and collapse in the 5th century, Latin evolved within each local area at an accelerated rate; and eventually the dialects diverged into myriad distinct varieties; some of which survive in modern forms. The overseas empires established by Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire and French colonial empires from the 15th century onward spread their languages to the other continents—to such an extent that about 70% of all Romance speakers today live outside Europe.

Despite multiple influences from pre-Roman languages and from later invasions, the phonology, morphology (linguistics), lexicon, and syntax of all Romance languages are predominantly evolutions of Latin. As a consequence, the group shares several linguistic features that set it apart from other Indo-European branches. In particular, with only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the declension system of Classical Latin and, as a result, have Subject Verb Object sentence structure and make extensive use of Adposition.

Name The term "Romance" comes from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice, derived from romanicus: used, for instance, in the expression romanice loqui, "to speak Roman" (that is, the Latin vernacular), contrasted with latine loqui, "to speak Latin" (the Medieval Latin which was taught in schools), and with barbarice loqui, "to speak Barbarian" (the non-Latin languages of the peoples that conquered the Roman Empire). From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice, or "in the Roman vernacular".

The word romance with the 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".

History Vulgar Latin There is very little documentary evidence about the nature of Vulgar Latin, and it is often hard to interpret or generalise based upon what does exist. In any case, many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples and forced resettlers—that is, more likely to be natives of the 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 declension system and its replacement by prepositions, the loss of the neuter gender, of Latin declension, and of many verbal tenses, the innovative use of article (grammar), and the initial stages of change in pronunciation of c and g before the front vowels e and i. There are some modern languages such as Finnish language#Formal and informal Finnish which have similar, quite sharp, differences between their printed and spoken form, which suggests that perhaps the Vulgar Latin which became the Romance languages was always there, spoken alongside the written Classical Latin reserved for official and formal occasions.

Fall of the Empire The political decline of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the large-scale Migration Period, notably the Germanic peoples incursions, led to a fragmentation of the Latin-speaking world into several independent states. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by Germanic and Slavic peoples tribes, Huns and Turkic peoples, isolating Romania from the rest of Latin Europe. Latin also disappeared from southern Great Britain, which had been for a time part of the Empire. But the Germanic tribes that had entered Italy, France, and the Iberian Peninsula eventually adopted Latin and the remnants of Roman culture, and so Latin continued to be the dominant language there.



Latent incubation Between the fifth and 10th century centuries, spoken Vulgar Latin underwent divergent evolution in the various parts of its domain, leading to innumerable distinct languages. This evolution is poorly documented, for the written language continued to be a Latin close to the Classical variant.

Recognition of the vernaculars Between the 10th and 13th century 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 other countries, such as Italy, the rise of the vernacular was the result of many prominent poets and writers adopting it as their written medium.

Uniformization and standardization The invention of the press apparently slowed down the evolution of Romance languages from the 16th century on, and brought instead a tendency towards greater uniformity of standard languages within political boundaries, at the expense of other Romance languages or dialects less favored politically. In France, for instance, the Francien spoken in the region of Paris gradually spread to the entire country, while the Langue d'oc and Franco-Provençal language of the south lost ground.

Current status The most widely spoken Romance language by native speaker today is Spanish language, followed by Portuguese language, French language, Italian language and Romanian language, all of which are main and official national languages in more than one country. A few other languages have official status on a regional or otherwise limited level, for instance Friulian, Sardinian language and Franco-Provençal language in Italy; Romansh language in Switzerland; Galician language, Occitan language Aranese language and Catalan language in Spain (the last of which is also the only official language in the small sovereign state of Andorra). 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; French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Outside Europe, French language, Spanish language and Portuguese language are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that made up their respective colonial empires. French is an official language of Canada, Haiti, many countries in Africa, and some in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans, as well as France's current overseas possession. Spanish is an official language of Mexico, much of South America, Central America and the Caribbean, and of Equatorial Guinea in Africa. Portuguese is the official language of Brazil, multiple countries in Africa and of East Timor. Although Italy also had some colonial possessions, its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial domination, resulting in Italian language being spoken only as a minority or secondary language by immigrant communities in North America and South America and Australia or African countries like Libya, Eritrea and Somalia. Romanian language is also the official language of Moldova (known by its local official name of Moldovan and in the Serbian province of Voivodina. Romania did not establish a colonial empire, but the language spread outside of Europe due to emigration, notably in Western Asia; Romanian language flourished in Israel, where it is spoken by some 5% of the total population as mother tongue, 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 and by many more as a secondary language, considering the large population of Romanian-born Jews who moved to Israel after World War II. Reports of about 300,000 Jews who left the country after WW2

The total native speakers of Romance languages is divided as follows (with their ranking within the languages of the world in brackets):

• Spanish language 47% (2nd-3rd)
• Portuguese language 26% (7th)
• French language 11% (11th)
• Italian language 9% (18th)
• Romanian language 4% (34th)
• Catalan language 1% (93rd)
• others 2%

Source: MSN Encarta - Languages Spoken by More Than 10 Million People (number of Romance speakers estimated at 690 million speakers, number of Catalan language speakers estimated at 9.1 million)

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 a potential source of separatism movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it—by extensively promoting the use of the official language, by restricting the use of the "other" languages in the media, by characterizing them as mere "dialects"—or worse.

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

Linguistic features Features inherited from Indo-European As members of the Indo-European (IE) family, Romance languages have a number of features that are shared with other members of this family, and in particular with English language; but which set them apart from languages of other families, such as Arabic language, Basque language, Hungarian language, or Georgian language. These include:

• Almost all their words are classified into four major classes — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs — each with a specific set of possible syntactic roles.
• Nouns, adjectives, determiner (class)s and some pronouns inflect according to grammatical number and grammatical gender.
• Inflection is normally marked with suffixes.
• A variety of grammatical category are expressed on verbs, such as:
• grammatical person and number;
• grammatical tense, grammatical mood, and grammatical aspect.
• grammatical voice.
• They are verb-centered; meaning that the basic clause structure consists of a verb, expressing an action involving one or more nouns — the verb argument — that play specific semantic roles in the action and specific syntactic roles in the clause.
• They are fusional language, morphosyntactic alignment languages.

Features inherited from Classical Latin The Romance languages share a number of features that were inherited from Classical Latin, and collectively set them apart from most other Indo-European languages.

• They have two grammatical numbers, singular and plural (no Dual (grammatical number)).
• In most languages, personal pronouns have different forms according to their grammatical function in a sentence (a remnant of the Latin case system); there is usually a form for the subjective (grammar) (inherited from the Latin nominative) another for the objective (grammar) (from the accusative or the dative), and a third set of personal pronouns used after prepositions or in stressed positions (see Prepositional pronoun and Disjunctive pronoun, for further information). Third person pronouns often have different forms for the direct object (accusative), the indirect object (dative), and the reflexive pronoun.
• Most are null-subject languages. French is a notable exception.
• Verbs have many grammatical conjugation, including in most languages:
• A present tense, a preterite, an imperfect tense, a pluperfect and a future tense in the indicative mood, for statements of fact.
• Present and preterite subjunctive tenses, for hypothetical or uncertain conditions. Several languages (for example, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) have also imperfect and pluperfect subjunctives.
• An imperative mood, for direct commands.
• Three non-finite verb: infinitive, gerund, and past participle.
• Distinct active and passive voices, as well as an impersonal passive voice.
• The main tense and mood distinctions that were made in classical Latin are generally still present in the modern Romance languages, though many are now expressed through periphrasis rather than simple verbs. The passive voice, which was mostly made up of simple verbs in classical Latin, was completely replaced with compound forms.
• Several tenses, especially of the indicative mood, have been preserved with little change:

{| class="wikitable"! !! Present !! Preterite !! Imperfect|-! Latin| dīcit || dīxit || dicēbat|-! Italian| dice || disse || diceva|-! Spanish| dice || dijo || decía|-! Sicilian| dici || dissi || dicìa|-! French| dit || dit || disait|-! Neapolitan| dice || dicette || diceva|-! Portuguese| diz || disse || dizia|-! Romanian| zice || zise || zicea|-! Galician| di || dixo || dicía|-! Catalan| diu || digué|| deia|-! Piedmontese| a dis || a l'ha dit (until 18th c. a dìsser)|| a disìa|-! English| says || said || used to say|}

Features inherited from Vulgar Latin Romance languages also have a number of features that are not shared with Classical Latin. Most of these features are thought to be inherited from Vulgar Latin. Even though the Romance languages are all derived from Latin, they are arguably much closer to each other than to their common ancestor, due to a core of common developments. The main difference is the loss of the case system of Classical Latin, an essential feature which allowed great freedom of word order, and has no counterpart in any Romance language except Romanian. In this regard, the distance between any modern Romance language and Latin is comparable to that between English language and Old English. While speakers of French, Italian or Spanish, for example, can quickly learn to see through the phonological changes reflected in spelling differences, and thus recognize many Latin words, they will often fail to understand the meaning of Latin sentences.

• The distinctions of vowel length present in Classical Latin were lost in most Romance languages (an exception is Friulian language), and partly replaced with "qualitative" contrasts like monophthong versus diphthong (Italian, Spanish; French to a lesser extent), or with vowel height contrasts (as in Portuguese and Catalan).
• There are definite and indefinite article (grammar)s, derived from Latin demonstratives and the numeral unus ("one").
• There are only two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. The neuter gender of Latin has been lost (mostly merging with the masculine). (Exceptions: Romanian language, which retains neuter; Spanish, which has the neuter third person pronoun ello, the neuter demonstratives eso, esto, aquello, and the neuter article lo, all used for objects or some abstract notions; and Italian, which while not keeping the neuter gender intact, has residual traces of it represented by some words that switch gender between singular and plural, such as il dito (the finger), plural le dita, inherited from Latin digitum, plural digita).
• Apart from gender and number, nouns, adjectives and determiners are not inflected. grammatical case have generally been lost, though a trace of them survives in the personal pronouns. An exception is Romanian language, which retains a combined genitive-dative case.
• Adjectives generally follow the noun they modify.
• 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") and trahere ("to drag").
• Many Latin constructions involving nominalized verbal forms (e.g. the use of accusative plus infinitive in free indirect speech and the use of the Latin grammar) were dropped in favor of constructions with subordinate clauses in all Romance languages except Italian (for example, Latin tempore permittente > Italian tempo permettendo; L. hoc facto > I. fatto ciò).
• The normal clause structure is subject verb object, rather than subject object verb, and is much less flexible than in Latin.
• Due to sound changes which made it homonym with the preterite, the Latin future tense was dropped, and replaced with a periphrasis of the form infinitive + present tense of habēre ("to have"). With time, this structure was grammaticalisation as a new future tense.
• In a similar process, an entirely new tense conditional mood#Conditional forms in Romance was created.
• While the synthetic grammatical voice of classical Latin was abandoned in favour of periphrasis constructions, the active voice remained in use. However, several tenses have changed meaning, especially subjunctives. For example:
• The Latin pluperfect indicative became a conditional mood in Catalan and Sicilian, and an imperfect subjunctive mood in Spanish.
• The Latin pluperfect subjunctive developed into an imperfect subjunctive in all languages except Romansh, where it became a conditional, and Romanian, where it became a pluperfect tense.
• The Latin preterite subjunctive, together with the future perfect indicative, became a future subjunctive in Old Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician language.
• The Latin imperfect subjunctive became a personal infinitive in Portuguese and Galician.
• Many Romance languages have two copula, derived from the Latin stare (mostly used for "temporary state") and esse (mostly used for "essential attributes"). However, the distinction was eventually lost in some languages, notably French, which now have only the first copula. In French, stare and esse had become ester and estre by the late Middle Ages. Due to phonological development, there were the forms êter and être, which eventually merged to être. In Italian, the two verbs share the same past participle, stato. See Romance copula, for further information.

Other shared features The Romance languages also share a number of features that were not the result of common inheritance, but rather of various cultural diffusion processes in the Middle Ages — such as literary diffusion, commercial and military interactions, political domination, influence of the Catholic Church, and (especially in later times) conscious attempts to "purify" the languages by reference to Classical Latin. Some of those features have in fact spread to other non-Romance (and even non-Indo-European) languages, chiefly in Europe. Here are some of these "late origin" shared features:

• Most Romance languages have polite forms of address that change the person and/or number of 2nd person subjects (T-V distinction), such as the tu/vous contrast in French, the tu/Lei contrast in Italian, the tu/dumneavoastră (from dominus + vostre) in Romanian or the tú (or vos) /usted contrast in Spanish.
• They all have a large collection of learned Hellenism (neoclassicism)s and Latinisms, with prefixes, stems, and suffixes retained or reintroduced from Greek and Latin, and used to coin new words. Most of these are also used in English, e.g. tele-, poly-, meta-, pseudo-, dis-, ex-, post-, -scope, -logy, -tion.
• During the Renaissance, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and a few other Romance languages developed a new, progressive aspect that did not exist in Latin. In French, progressive constructions remain very limited, the imperfective generally being preferred, as in Latin.
• Many Romance languages now have a verbal construction analogous to the present perfect of English. In some, it has taken the place of the old preterite (at least in the vernacular); in others, the two coexist with somewhat different meanings.

Divergent features In spite of their common origin, the descendants of Vulgar Latin have many differences. These 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 possible homogeneity in Vulgar Latin itself.

It is often said that French and Portuguese are the most innovative of the Romance languages, each in different ways, that Sardinian language and Romanian language are the most isolated and conservative variants, and that the languages of Italy other than Sardinian (including Italian language) occupy a middle ground. Some even claim that Languedocien language is the "most average" western Romance language. However, these evaluations are largely subjective, as they depend on how much weight one assigns to specific features. In fact all Romance languages, including Sardinian and Romanian, are all vastly different from their common ancestor.

Romanian (together with other related minor languages, like Aromanian) in fact has a number of grammatical features which are unique within Romance, but are shared with other non-Romance languages of the Balkans, such as Albanian language, Bulgarian language, Greek language, Serbian language and Turkish language. 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 the Balkan linguistic union, may be due to contacts between those languages in post-Roman times.

Sound changes The vocabularies of Romance languages have undergone considerable change since their birth, by various phonological processes that were characteristic of each language. Those changes applied more or less systematically to all words, but were often conditioned by the sound context or morphological structure.

Some languages have lost sounds from the original Latin words. French, in particular, has dropped all final vowels, and sometimes also the preceding consonant: thus Latin lupus and luna became Italian lupo and luna but French loup and lune . Catalan, Occitan, many Northern Italian dialects, and Romanian (Daco-Romanian) lost the final vowels in most masculine nouns and adjectives, but retained them in the feminine. Other languages, including Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and the Southern dialects of Romanian have retained those vowels.

Some languages have lost the final vowel -e from verbal infinitives, e.g. dīcere → Portuguese dizer ("to say"). Other common cases of final truncation are the verbal endings, e.g. Latin amāt → Italian ama ("he loves"), amābam → amavo ("I loved"), amābat → amava ("he loved"), amābatis → amavate ("you (pl.) loved"), etc.

Sounds have often been lost in the middle of words, too; e.g. Latin Luna → Galician and Portuguese Lua, crēdere → Spanish creer ("to believe").

On the other hand, some languages have inserted many epenthesis vowels in certain contexts. For instance Spanish, Galician and Portuguese have generally inserted an e at the start of Latin words that began with s + consonant, such as sperō → espero ("I hope"). French originally did the same, but then dropped the s: spatula → arch. espaule → épaule ("shoulder"). In the case of Italian, a unique article, lo for the definite and uno for the indefinite, is used for masculine s + consonant words (sbaglio, "mistake"), as well as all masculine words beginning with z (zaino, "backpack").

For more detailed descriptions, see the articles History of French, Portuguese vocabulary#From Latin to Portuguese, Latin to Romanian sound changes, and Linguistic history of Spanish.

Lexical stress The position of the stressed syllable in a word generally varies from word to word in each Romance language, and often moves as the word is inflected. Sometimes the stress is lexically significant, e.g. Italian Papa ("Pope") and papà ("daddy"), or Spanish imperfect subjunctive cantara (" he sang") and future cantará ("he will sing"). However, the main function of Romance stress in 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.

In Romance languages, the stress is usually confined to one of the last three syllables of the word. That limit may be occasionally exceeded by some verbs with attached clitics, e.g. Italian mettiamocene or Metintilu in Friulian ("let's put some of it in there"), Spanish entregándomelo ("delivering it to me") or Portuguese dávamo-vo-lo ("we were giving it to you"). Originally the stress was predominantly in the penultimate syllable, but that pattern has changed considerably in some languages. In French, for instance, the loss of final vowels has left the stress almost exclusively on the last syllable.

Formation of plurals Some Romance languages form plurals by adding (derived from the plural of the Latin accusative case), while others form the plural by changing the final vowel (by influence of the Latin nominative ending ).

• Vowel change: Italian, Romanian.
• Plural in : Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian, Romansh.
• Special case of French: Falls into the second group historically (and orthographically), but the final -s is no longer pronounced (except in liaison (linguistics) contexts), meaning that singular and plural nouns are usually homophonous in isolation. Many determiners have a distinct plural formed by changing the vowel and allowing in liaison.

Borrowed words Vulgar Latin borrowed many words, often from Germanic languages that replaced words from Classical Latin during the Migration Period, even including common basic vocabulary. Notable examples are *blancus (white), which replaced Classical Latin albus in most major languages and dialects except for Romanian language; *guerra (war), which replaced bellum; and words for the cardinal directions, where words similar to English north, south, east and west replaced the Classical Latin words borealis (or septentrionalis) (north), australis (or meridionalis) (south), occidentalis (west) and orientalis (east) everywhere (for standard usage). See History of French#The Franks.

Derivations Words for "more" Some Romance languages use a version of Latin plus, others a version of magis.

• Plus-derived: Sardinian prusu, French plus , Piedmontese pi, Lombard pu, Ligurian ciù, Italian più , Friulian plui, Romansh pli, Venetian pi. In Catalan pus is exclusively used on negative statements in Mallorcan Catalan dialect, and "més" is the word mostly used.
• Magis-derived: Sardinian (mera), Galician and Portuguese (mais; mediaeval Galician-Portuguese had both words: mais and chus), Spanish (más), Catalan (més), Venetian (massa or masa, "too much") Occitan (mai), Romanian (mai), Italian (mai, used in constructions such as non... mai, meaning "never", or "Londra è la più grande città che io abbia mai visto" "London is the biggest city I have ever seen").

Words for "nothing" Although the Latin word for "nothing" is nihil, the common word for "nothing" became nudha in Sardinian, nada in Spanish and Portuguese, nada and ren in Galician, rien in French, res in Catalan, cosa and res in Aragonese, ren in Occitan, nimic in Romanian, and niente and nulla in Italian, gnente in Venetian, Lombard and Piedmontese (but the Piedmontese negative adverb nen cames from NE-Ente), and nue and nuie in Friulian. Some argue that all three roots derive from different parts of a Latin phrase nullam rem natam ("no thing born"), an emphatic idiom for "nothing". Meanwhile, Italian and Venetian niente and gnente would seem to be more logically derived from Latin ne(c) entem ("no being").

The number 16 Romanian constructs the names of the numbers 11–19 by a regular pattern which 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":

• "Sixteen": Catalan and Occitan setze, French seize, Italian sedici, Venetian sédexe, Romansh sedesch, Friulian sedis, Lombard sedas / sedes, Franco-Provençal sèze, Sardinian sédichi, Piedmontese sëddes.
• "Ten and six": Portuguese dezasseis or dezesseis, Galician dezaseis, Spanish dieciséis, the Marchigiano dialect digissei.
• "Six over ten": Romanian șaisprezece (where spre derives from Latin super).

Classical Latin uses the "one-ten" pattern for 11–17 (ūndecim, duodecim, ..., septendecim), but then switches to "two-off-twenty" (duodēvigintī) and "one-off-twenty" (ūndēvigintī). For the sake of comparison, note that English and German 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.

To have and to hold The verbs derived from Latin habēre "to have", tenēre "to hold", and esse "to be" are used differently in the various Romance languages, to express possession, to construct perfect tenses, and to make existential statements ("there is"). If we use T for tenēre, H for habēre, and E for esse, we have the following distribution:

• HHE: Romanian, Italian, Northern-Italian languages
• HHH: Occitan, French, Romansh.
• THH: Spanish, Catalan, Aragonese.
• TTH: European Portuguese.
• TTT: Brazilian Portuguese. (colloquial)

For example: English: I have, I have done, there is (HHE) Friulian: (jo) o ai, (jo) o ai fat, a 'nd è, al è (HHE) Venetian: (mi) go, (mi) go fat, ghe xe, ghi n'é (HHE) Lombard (Western): (mi) a gh-u, (mi) a u fai, al gh'è, a gh'è (HHE) Piedmontese: (mi) i l'hai, (mi) i l'hai fàit, a-i é (HHE) Romanian: (eu) am, (eu) am făcut, este (or e) (HHE) Italian: (io) ho, (io) ho fatto, c'è (HHE) Romansh: (jau) hai, (jau) hai fatg, igl ha (HHH) French: j'ai, j'ai fait, il y a (HHH) Catalan: (jo) tinc, (jo) he fet, hi ha (THH) Aragonese: (yo) tiengo (but (yo) he dialectally), (yo) he feito, bi ha (THH) Spanish: (yo) tengo, (yo) he hecho, hay (THH) Galician: (eu) teño, - , hai (T-H; Galician does not have a present perfect) Portuguese: (eu) tenho, (eu) tenho feito, há in Portugal (TTH) / tem in Brazil (TTT) Ancient Galician-Portuguese used to employ the auxiliary H for permanent states, such as Eu hei um nome "I have a name" (i.e. for all my life), and T for non-permanent states Eu 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. Informal Brazilian Portuguese uses the T verb even in the existential sense, e.g. Tem água no copo "There is water in the glass".In most languages, the descendant of tenēre still has the sense of "to hold", as well, e.g. Italian tieni il libro, French tu tiens le livre, Catalan tens el llibre, Romanian ine cartea, Friulian Tu tu tegnis il libri "You're holding the book". In others, like Portuguese, this sense has been mostly lost, and a different verb is currently used for "to hold".Romansh uses, besides igl ha, the form i dat (literally: it gives), borrowed from German es gibt.

To have or to be Some languages use their equivalent of "have" as an auxiliary verb to form the perfect forms (e. g. French passé 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, Italian, Northern-Italian languages (Piedmontese, Lombard, Ligurian, Venitian, Friulian), Romansh, some dialects of Catalan (although such usage is recessing in those).

In the latter, the verbs which use "be" as an auxiliary are unaccusative verbs, that is, intransitive verbs that show motion not directly initiated by the subject or changes of state, such as "fall", "come", "become". All other verbs (intransitive unergative verbs and all transitive verbs) use "have". For example, in French, J'ai vu "I have seen" vs. Je suis tombé "I am fallen" ("I have fallen"). A similar dichotomy exists in the Germanic languages, which share the same Sprachbund; German and the Scandinavian languages use "have" and "be", while modern English uses "have" only.

I did or I have done Some languages (e.g. Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Portuguese and written French and Italian) make a distinction between a preterite and a present perfect tense (cf. English I did vs. I have done). Others (spoken French, Italian and Galician) contain only one tense, which renders both meanings. French, Italian, and European Spanish use the compound past for this, while Sicilian and Latin American Spanish use the simple past.

Writing systems 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 due to Slavic influences.Also the non-Christian populations of Spain used the systems of their culture languages (Arabic alphabet and Hebrew alphabet) to write aljamiado versions of Castilian (Ladino among Sephardic Jews).

Letter values All Romance languages are written with the "core" Latin alphabet of 22 letters — A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Y, Z — subsequently alphabets derived from the Latin in various ways. In particular, the letters K and W are rarely used in most Romance languages — mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words, as they were in late Latin.

While most of the 22 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 digraph (orthography)s or trigraph (orthography)s (see below) to represent phonetic phenomena not recorded in Latin, or to get around previously established spelling conventions.

A characteristic feature of the writing systems of almost all Romance languages is that the Latin letters C and G — which originally always represented and respectively — represent other sounds when they come before E, I, and in some cases Y and Œ. This is due to a general palatalization of and before front vowels like and . This is believed to have occurred in the transition from Classical to Vulgar Latin. Since the written form of all the affected words was tied to the classical language, the shift was accommodated by a change in the pronunciation rules. However, the new sounds of C and G in those contexts differ from language to language.

The spelling rules of most Romance languages are fairly complex, and subject to considerable regional variation. To a first approximation, the phonetic representation of non-combined letters can be summarized as follows:

C: generally , but "softened" before E, I, or Y in most Romance languages — to in French, Portuguese, Occitan, Catalan, and American Spanish; to in Peninsular Spanish and Galician; to in Romansh; and to in Italian, other Romance languages in Italy and Romanian. G: generally or , but "softened" before E, I, or Y in most languages — to in French, Portuguese, Occitan and Catalan; to or in Spanish (according to dialect); to in Romansh; and to in other Romance languages in Italy and Romanian. H: silent in most languages, but represents in Romanian and Gascon Occitan. Used in various digraphs (see below). J: represents in most languages; or in Spanish; in Romansh and in several of Italy's languages, though it is normally replaced with I in native Italian words. S: normally represents (either laminal consonant or apical consonant) at syllable, but usually between vowels. :wiktionary:intervocalic s is, however, pronounced in Spanish, Romanian, Galician and several varieties of Italian. In the syllable coda, it may have special allophone pronunciations. W: used only in Walloon language. Represents in French, with the exception of words borrowed from English. X: at the beginning of words, represents ) in French, or in Spanish, and in Portuguese, Catalan, and Galician. In :wiktionary:intervocalic position, represents in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian; in Catalan, French, and Romanian; in Galician and Spanish; in Catalan, Galician and Portuguese; in Ligurian; in Venetian, French and Portuguese; or in French and Portuguese. Not used in Italian (except in borrowings), where it is replaced by s. Y: used in French and Spanish for the vowel , and also as a consonant, (esp. in French), , or . Z: in most languages; either or in Galician and Spanish; either or in Italian.

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 Aspiration (phonetics) sounds in Greek before changing to corresponding fricatives and the represented what sounded to the Romans like an following , , and respectively. Some of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:

CI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy and Romanian to represent before A, O, or U. CH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Romanian, Romansh and Sardinian language to represent before E or I; in Spanish and Galician; in Romansh before A, O or U; and in most other languages. ÇH: used in Poitevin-Saintongeais for voiceless palatal fricative DD: used in Sicilian language and Sardinian language to represent the voiced retroflex plosive . In recent history more accurately transcribed as DDH. DJ: used in Walloon for . GI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy and Romanian to represent before A, O, or U. GH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Romanian, Romansh and Sardinian language to represent before E or I, and in Galician for the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (not standard sound). GL: used in Romansh before consonants and at the end of words for . GLI: used in Italian and Romansh for . GN: used in French, Italian, Romance languages in Italy and Romansh for , as in champignon or gnocchi. GU: used before E or I to represent or in all Romance languages except Italian, Romance languages in Italy and Romanian. LH: used in Portuguese and Occitan . LL: used in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Norman and Dgèrnésiais, originally for which has merged in some cases with . Represents in French unless it follows I (i) when it represents (or in some dialects). It's used in Occitan for a geminate consonant ĿL: used in Catalan for a geminate consonant . NH: used in Portuguese and Occitan for , used in official Galician for . N-: used in Piedmontese for between two vowels. NY: used in Catalan for . QU: represents in Italian and Romance languages in Italy; in French and Spanish; (before e or i) or (normally before a or o) in Portuguese and Catalan. RR: used between vowels in several languages to denote a Trill consonant or a guttural R, instead of the Flap consonant . SC: used before E or I in Italian and Romance languages in Italy for , and in French and Spanish as in words of certain etymology. SCH: used in Romansh for or . SCI: used in Italian and Romance languages in Italy to represent before A, O, or U. SH: used in Aranese Occitan for . SS: used in French, Portuguese, Piedmontese, Occitan and Catalan for between vowels. TG: used in Romansh for . TH: used in Jèrriais for (as in English "thick"); used in Aranese for either or TSCH: used in Romansh for .

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 etymology spellings, which now represent or , , and , respectively.

Gemination For most languages in this family, geminate consonant is no longer phonemically distinctive or present. The double consonants in French spelling are due to etymology. However, Italian, Sardinian language and Sicilian do have long consonants like BB, CC, DD, etc., where the doubling indicates a short hold before the consonant is released, which often has lexical value: e.g. note ("notes") vs. notte ("night"). They may even occur at the beginning of words in Romanesco, Neapolitan and Sicilian, and are occasionally written, e.g. Sicilian cchiù (more), and ccà (here). In general, the letters B, R and Z are long at the start of a word. The double consonants in Piedmontese exist only after stressed , written and they are not ethymological: vëdde (Latin videre, to see), sëcca (Latin sicca, dry, feminine of sech). In Jèrriais, long consonants are marked with an apostrophe: S'S is a long , SS'S is a long , and T'T is a long . In Catalan and Occitan exists a geminate sound 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.

Diacritics and special characters Diacritics found in the Romance languages are the acute accent (á), the grave accent (à), the circumflex accent (â), the diaeresis (ü), the tilde (ñ), and the breve (ă). The cedilla (ç), and the Comma (punctuation)#Diacritical usage ( and , in Romanian) are used to mark sound changes due to Palatalization#Historical .28diachronic.29 palatalizations.

An accent mark placed over a vowel generally denotes Stress (linguistics), Vowel#Height, or both. In Spanish, only stress is indicated, with an acute accent. Romanian â/î and ă are central vowels; stress is not marked in this language. Catalan and Occitan regularly mark stress with an acute accent on high vowels, and with a grave accent on low vowels in a similar but not identical way. Similarly, French é is a high-mid vowel and French è is a low-mid vowel, although in French stress is not indicated with diacritics. Italian and other Romance languages in Italy mark stress with the grave accent, except on high e and o, which are sometimes marked with an acute accent. Galician marks both stress and height with an acute accent, due to the fact that only stressed vowels can be pronounced low. Portuguese marks stress with the acute accent, except for high a, e, o, which take a circumflex accent. Homophones may be differentiated by a grave accent in Italian and French, by an acute accent in Spanish or even both cases may ocur in Portuguese.

The French orthography includes the etymological Ligature (typography) œ and (more rarely) æ.

Upper and lower case Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "Letter case" of the alphabet: majuscule ("uppercase" or "capital letters"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and minuscule ("lowercase"), derived from Carolingian minuscule 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 wor {{Infobox Language family|name = Romance|region = Spanish languageFrench languagePortuguese languageItalian languageRomanian language|familycolor = Indo-European|fam1 = Indo-European languages|fam2 = Italic languages|child1 = Italo-Western languages|child2 = Eastern Romance languages|child3 = Southern Romance languages|iso2=roa-->The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European languages that comprisies all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. They have more than 700 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, as well as many smaller regions scattered throughout the world.

All Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of soldiers, settlers and merchants of the Empire, which was significantly different from the Classical Latin of the Roman literati. Between 200 BC and AD 150, the expansion of the Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language over an area spanning from the Iberian Peninsula to the Western coast of the Black Sea, and from the Maghreb to Britannia. During the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and collapse in the 5th century, Latin evolved within each local area at an accelerated rate; and eventually the dialects diverged into myriad distinct varieties; some of which survive in modern forms. The overseas empires established by Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire and French colonial empires from the 15th century onward spread their languages to the other continents—to such an extent that about 70% of all Romance speakers today live outside Europe.

Despite multiple influences from pre-Roman languages and from later invasions, the phonology, morphology (linguistics), lexicon, and syntax of all Romance languages are predominantly evolutions of Latin. As a consequence, the group shares several linguistic features that set it apart from other Indo-European branches. In particular, with only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the declension system of Classical Latin and, as a result, have Subject Verb Object sentence structure and make extensive use of Adposition.

Name The term "Romance" comes from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice, derived from romanicus: used, for instance, in the expression romanice loqui, "to speak Roman" (that is, the Latin vernacular), contrasted with latine loqui, "to speak Latin" (the Medieval Latin which was taught in schools), and with barbarice loqui, "to speak Barbarian" (the non-Latin languages of the peoples that conquered the Roman Empire). From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice, or "in the Roman vernacular".

The word romance with the 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".

History Vulgar Latin There is very little documentary evidence about the nature of Vulgar Latin, and it is often hard to interpret or generalise based upon what does exist. In any case, many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples and forced resettlers—that is, more likely to be natives of the 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 declension system and its replacement by prepositions, the loss of the neuter gender, of Latin declension, and of many verbal tenses, the innovative use of article (grammar), and the initial stages of change in pronunciation of c and g before the front vowels e and i. There are some modern languages such as Finnish language#Formal and informal Finnish which have similar, quite sharp, differences between their printed and spoken form, which suggests that perhaps the Vulgar Latin which became the Romance languages was always there, spoken alongside the written Classical Latin reserved for official and formal occasions.

Fall of the Empire The political decline of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the large-scale Migration Period, notably the Germanic peoples incursions, led to a fragmentation of the Latin-speaking world into several independent states. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by Germanic and Slavic peoples tribes, Huns and Turkic peoples, isolating Romania from the rest of Latin Europe. Latin also disappeared from southern Great Britain, which had been for a time part of the Empire. But the Germanic tribes that had entered Italy, France, and the Iberian Peninsula eventually adopted Latin and the remnants of Roman culture, and so Latin continued to be the dominant language there.



Latent incubation Between the fifth and 10th century centuries, spoken Vulgar Latin underwent divergent evolution in the various parts of its domain, leading to innumerable distinct languages. This evolution is poorly documented, for the written language continued to be a Latin close to the Classical variant.

Recognition of the vernaculars Between the 10th and 13th century 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 other countries, such as Italy, the rise of the vernacular was the result of many prominent poets and writers adopting it as their written medium.

Uniformization and standardization The invention of the press apparently slowed down the evolution of Romance languages from the 16th century on, and brought instead a tendency towards greater uniformity of standard languages within political boundaries, at the expense of other Romance languages or dialects less favored politically. In France, for instance, the Francien spoken in the region of Paris gradually spread to the entire country, while the Langue d'oc and Franco-Provençal language of the south lost ground.

Current status The most widely spoken Romance language by native speaker today is Spanish language, followed by Portuguese language, French language, Italian language and Romanian language, all of which are main and official national languages in more than one country. A few other languages have official status on a regional or otherwise limited level, for instance Friulian, Sardinian language and Franco-Provençal language in Italy; Romansh language in Switzerland; Galician language, Occitan language Aranese language and Catalan language in Spain (the last of which is also the only official language in the small sovereign state of Andorra). 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; French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Outside Europe, French language, Spanish language and Portuguese language are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that made up their respective colonial empires. French is an official language of Canada, Haiti, many countries in Africa, and some in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans, as well as France's current overseas possession. Spanish is an official language of Mexico, much of South America, Central America and the Caribbean, and of Equatorial Guinea in Africa. Portuguese is the official language of Brazil, multiple countries in Africa and of East Timor. Although Italy also had some colonial possessions, its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial domination, resulting in Italian language being spoken only as a minority or secondary language by immigrant communities in North America and South America and Australia or African countries like Libya, Eritrea and Somalia. Romanian language is also the official language of Moldova (known by its local official name of Moldovan and in the Serbian province of Voivodina. Romania did not establish a colonial empire, but the language spread outside of Europe due to emigration, notably in Western Asia; Romanian language flourished in Israel, where it is spoken by some 5% of the total population as mother tongue, 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 and by many more as a secondary language, considering the large population of Romanian-born Jews who moved to Israel after World War II. Reports of about 300,000 Jews who left the country after WW2

The total native speakers of Romance languages is divided as follows (with their ranking within the languages of the world in brackets):

• Spanish language 47% (2nd-3rd)
• Portuguese language 26% (7th)
• French language 11% (11th)
• Italian language 9% (18th)
• Romanian language 4% (34th)
• Catalan language 1% (93rd)
• others 2%

Source: MSN Encarta - Languages Spoken by More Than 10 Million People (number of Romance speakers estimated at 690 million speakers, number of Catalan language speakers estimated at 9.1 million)

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 a potential source of separatism movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it—by extensively promoting the use of the official language, by restricting the use of the "other" languages in the media, by characterizing them as mere "dialects"—or worse.

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

Linguistic features Features inherited from Indo-European As members of the Indo-European (IE) family, Romance languages have a number of features that are shared with other members of this family, and in particular with English language; but which set them apart from languages of other families, such as Arabic language, Basque language, Hungarian language, or Georgian language. These include:

• Almost all their words are classified into four major classes — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs — each with a specific set of possible syntactic roles.
• Nouns, adjectives, determiner (class)s and some pronouns inflect according to grammatical number and grammatical gender.
• Inflection is normally marked with suffixes.
• A variety of grammatical category are expressed on verbs, such as:
• grammatical person and number;
• grammatical tense, grammatical mood, and grammatical aspect.
• grammatical voice.
• They are verb-centered; meaning that the basic clause structure consists of a verb, expressing an action involving one or more nouns — the verb argument — that play specific semantic roles in the action and specific syntactic roles in the clause.
• They are fusional language, morphosyntactic alignment languages.

Features inherited from Classical Latin The Romance languages share a number of features that were inherited from Classical Latin, and collectively set them apart from most other Indo-European languages.

• They have two grammatical numbers, singular and plural (no Dual (grammatical number)).
• In most languages, personal pronouns have different forms according to their grammatical function in a sentence (a remnant of the Latin case system); there is usually a form for the subjective (grammar) (inherited from the Latin nominative) another for the objective (grammar) (from the accusative or the dative), and a third set of personal pronouns used after prepositions or in stressed positions (see Prepositional pronoun and Disjunctive pronoun, for further information). Third person pronouns often have different forms for the direct object (accusative), the indirect object (dative), and the reflexive pronoun.
• Most are null-subject languages. French is a notable exception.
• Verbs have many grammatical conjugation, including in most languages:
• A present tense, a preterite, an imperfect tense, a pluperfect and a future tense in the indicative mood, for statements of fact.
• Present and preterite subjunctive tenses, for hypothetical or uncertain conditions. Several languages (for example, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) have also imperfect and pluperfect subjunctives.
• An imperative mood, for direct commands.
• Three non-finite verb: infinitive, gerund, and past participle.
• Distinct active and passive voices, as well as an impersonal passive voice.
• The main tense and mood distinctions that were made in classical Latin are generally still present in the modern Romance languages, though many are now expressed through periphrasis rather than simple verbs. The passive voice, which was mostly made up of simple verbs in classical Latin, was completely replaced with compound forms.
• Several tenses, especially of the indicative mood, have been preserved with little change:

{| class="wikitable"! !! Present !! Preterite !! Imperfect|-! Latin| dīcit || dīxit || dicēbat|-! Italian| dice || disse || diceva|-! Spanish| dice || dijo || decía|-! Sicilian| dici || dissi || dicìa|-! French| dit || dit || disait|-! Neapolitan| dice || dicette || diceva|-! Portuguese| diz || disse || dizia|-! Romanian| zice || zise || zicea|-! Galician| di || dixo || dicía|-! Catalan| diu || digué|| deia|-! Piedmontese| a dis || a l'ha dit (until 18th c. a dìsser)|| a disìa|-! English| says || said || used to say|}

Features inherited from Vulgar Latin Romance languages also have a number of features that are not shared with Classical Latin. Most of these features are thought to be inherited from Vulgar Latin. Even though the Romance languages are all derived from Latin, they are arguably much closer to each other than to their common ancestor, due to a core of common developments. The main difference is the loss of the case system of Classical Latin, an essential feature which allowed great freedom of word order, and has no counterpart in any Romance language except Romanian. In this regard, the distance between any modern Romance language and Latin is comparable to that between English language and Old English. While speakers of French, Italian or Spanish, for example, can quickly learn to see through the phonological changes reflected in spelling differences, and thus recognize many Latin words, they will often fail to understand the meaning of Latin sentences.

• The distinctions of vowel length present in Classical Latin were lost in most Romance languages (an exception is Friulian language), and partly replaced with "qualitative" contrasts like monophthong versus diphthong (Italian, Spanish; French to a lesser extent), or with vowel height contrasts (as in Portuguese and Catalan).
• There are definite and indefinite article (grammar)s, derived from Latin demonstratives and the numeral unus ("one").
• There are only two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. The neuter gender of Latin has been lost (mostly merging with the masculine). (Exceptions: Romanian language, which retains neuter; Spanish, which has the neuter third person pronoun ello, the neuter demonstratives eso, esto, aquello, and the neuter article lo, all used for objects or some abstract notions; and Italian, which while not keeping the neuter gender intact, has residual traces of it represented by some words that switch gender between singular and plural, such as il dito (the finger), plural le dita, inherited from Latin digitum, plural digita).
• Apart from gender and number, nouns, adjectives and determiners are not inflected. grammatical case have generally been lost, though a trace of them survives in the personal pronouns. An exception is Romanian language, which retains a combined genitive-dative case.
• Adjectives generally follow the noun they modify.
• 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") and trahere ("to drag").
• Many Latin constructions involving nominalized verbal forms (e.g. the use of accusative plus infinitive in free indirect speech and the use of the Latin grammar) were dropped in favor of constructions with subordinate clauses in all Romance languages except Italian (for example, Latin tempore permittente > Italian tempo permettendo; L. hoc facto > I. fatto ciò).
• The normal clause structure is subject verb object, rather than subject object verb, and is much less flexible than in Latin.
• Due to sound changes which made it homonym with the preterite, the Latin future tense was dropped, and replaced with a periphrasis of the form infinitive + present tense of habēre ("to have"). With time, this structure was grammaticalisation as a new future tense.
• In a similar process, an entirely new tense conditional mood#Conditional forms in Romance was created.
• While the synthetic grammatical voice of classical Latin was abandoned in favour of periphrasis constructions, the active voice remained in use. However, several tenses have changed meaning, especially subjunctives. For example:
• The Latin pluperfect indicative became a conditional mood in Catalan and Sicilian, and an imperfect subjunctive mood in Spanish.
• The Latin pluperfect subjunctive developed into an imperfect subjunctive in all languages except Romansh, where it became a conditional, and Romanian, where it became a pluperfect tense.
• The Latin preterite subjunctive, together with the future perfect indicative, became a future subjunctive in Old Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician language.
• The Latin imperfect subjunctive became a personal infinitive in Portuguese and Galician.
• Many Romance languages have two copula, derived from the Latin stare (mostly used for "temporary state") and esse (mostly used for "essential attributes"). However, the distinction was eventually lost in some languages, notably French, which now have only the first copula. In French, stare and esse had become ester and estre by the late Middle Ages. Due to phonological development, there were the forms êter and être, which eventually merged to être. In Italian, the two verbs share the same past participle, stato. See Romance copula, for further information.

Other shared features The Romance languages also share a number of features that were not the result of common inheritance, but rather of various cultural diffusion processes in the Middle Ages — such as literary diffusion, commercial and military interactions, political domination, influence of the Catholic Church, and (especially in later times) conscious attempts to "purify" the languages by reference to Classical Latin. Some of those features have in fact spread to other non-Romance (and even non-Indo-European) languages, chiefly in Europe. Here are some of these "late origin" shared features:

• Most Romance languages have polite forms of address that change the person and/or number of 2nd person subjects (T-V distinction), such as the tu/vous contrast in French, the tu/Lei contrast in Italian, the tu/dumneavoastră (from dominus + vostre) in Romanian or the tú (or vos) /usted contrast in Spanish.
• They all have a large collection of learned Hellenism (neoclassicism)s and Latinisms, with prefixes, stems, and suffixes retained or reintroduced from Greek and Latin, and used to coin new words. Most of these are also used in English, e.g. tele-, poly-, meta-, pseudo-, dis-, ex-, post-, -scope, -logy, -tion.
• During the Renaissance, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and a few other Romance languages developed a new, progressive aspect that did not exist in Latin. In French, progressive constructions remain very limited, the imperfective generally being preferred, as in Latin.
• Many Romance languages now have a verbal construction analogous to the present perfect of English. In some, it has taken the place of the old preterite (at least in the vernacular); in others, the two coexist with somewhat different meanings.

Divergent features In spite of their common origin, the descendants of Vulgar Latin have many differences. These 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 possible homogeneity in Vulgar Latin itself.

It is often said that French and Portuguese are the most innovative of the Romance languages, each in different ways, that Sardinian language and Romanian language are the most isolated and conservative variants, and that the languages of Italy other than Sardinian (including Italian language) occupy a middle ground. Some even claim that Languedocien language is the "most average" western Romance language. However, these evaluations are largely subjective, as they depend on how much weight one assigns to specific features. In fact all Romance languages, including Sardinian and Romanian, are all vastly different from their common ancestor.

Romanian (together with other related minor languages, like Aromanian) in fact has a number of grammatical features which are unique within Romance, but are shared with other non-Romance languages of the Balkans, such as Albanian language, Bulgarian language, Greek language, Serbian language and Turkish language. 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 the Balkan linguistic union, may be due to contacts between those languages in post-Roman times.

Sound changes The vocabularies of Romance languages have undergone considerable change since their birth, by various phonological processes that were characteristic of each language. Those changes applied more or less systematically to all words, but were often conditioned by the sound context or morphological structure.

Some languages have lost sounds from the original Latin words. French, in particular, has dropped all final vowels, and sometimes also the preceding consonant: thus Latin lupus and luna became Italian lupo and luna but French loup and lune . Catalan, Occitan, many Northern Italian dialects, and Romanian (Daco-Romanian) lost the final vowels in most masculine nouns and adjectives, but retained them in the feminine. Other languages, including Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and the Southern dialects of Romanian have retained those vowels.

Some languages have lost the final vowel -e from verbal infinitives, e.g. dīcere → Portuguese dizer ("to say"). Other common cases of final truncation are the verbal endings, e.g. Latin amāt → Italian ama ("he loves"), amābam → amavo ("I loved"), amābat → amava ("he loved"), amābatis → amavate ("you (pl.) loved"), etc.

Sounds have often been lost in the middle of words, too; e.g. Latin Luna → Galician and Portuguese Lua, crēdere → Spanish creer ("to believe").

On the other hand, some languages have inserted many epenthesis vowels in certain contexts. For instance Spanish, Galician and Portuguese have generally inserted an e at the start of Latin words that began with s + consonant, such as sperō → espero ("I hope"). French originally did the same, but then dropped the s: spatula → arch. espaule → épaule ("shoulder"). In the case of Italian, a unique article, lo for the definite and uno for the indefinite, is used for masculine s + consonant words (sbaglio, "mistake"), as well as all masculine words beginning with z (zaino, "backpack").

For more detailed descriptions, see the articles History of French, Portuguese vocabulary#From Latin to Portuguese, Latin to Romanian sound changes, and Linguistic history of Spanish.

Lexical stress The position of the stressed syllable in a word generally varies from word to word in each Romance language, and often moves as the word is inflected. Sometimes the stress is lexically significant, e.g. Italian Papa ("Pope") and papà ("daddy"), or Spanish imperfect subjunctive cantara (" he sang") and future cantará ("he will sing"). However, the main function of Romance stress in 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.

In Romance languages, the stress is usually confined to one of the last three syllables of the word. That limit may be occasionally exceeded by some verbs with attached clitics, e.g. Italian mettiamocene or Metintilu in Friulian ("let's put some of it in there"), Spanish entregándomelo ("delivering it to me") or Portuguese dávamo-vo-lo ("we were giving it to you"). Originally the stress was predominantly in the penultimate syllable, but that pattern has changed considerably in some languages. In French, for instance, the loss of final vowels has left the stress almost exclusively on the last syllable.

Formation of plurals Some Romance languages form plurals by adding (derived from the plural of the Latin accusative case), while others form the plural by changing the final vowel (by influence of the Latin nominative ending ).

• Vowel change: Italian, Romanian.
• Plural in : Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian, Romansh.
• Special case of French: Falls into the second group historically (and orthographically), but the final -s is no longer pronounced (except in liaison (linguistics) contexts), meaning that singular and plural nouns are usually homophonous in isolation. Many determiners have a distinct plural formed by changing the vowel and allowing in liaison.

Borrowed words Vulgar Latin borrowed many words, often from Germanic languages that replaced words from Classical Latin during the Migration Period, even including common basic vocabulary. Notable examples are *blancus (white), which replaced Classical Latin albus in most major languages and dialects except for Romanian language; *guerra (war), which replaced bellum; and words for the cardinal directions, where words similar to English north, south, east and west replaced the Classical Latin words borealis (or septentrionalis) (north), australis (or meridionalis) (south), occidentalis (west) and orientalis (east) everywhere (for standard usage). See History of French#The Franks.

Derivations Words for "more" Some Romance languages use a version of Latin plus, others a version of magis.

• Plus-derived: Sardinian prusu, French plus , Piedmontese pi, Lombard pu, Ligurian ciù, Italian più , Friulian plui, Romansh pli, Venetian pi. In Catalan pus is exclusively used on negative statements in Mallorcan Catalan dialect, and "més" is the word mostly used.
• Magis-derived: Sardinian (mera), Galician and Portuguese (mais; mediaeval Galician-Portuguese had both words: mais and chus), Spanish (más), Catalan (més), Venetian (massa or masa, "too much") Occitan (mai), Romanian (mai), Italian (mai, used in constructions such as non... mai, meaning "never", or "Londra è la più grande città che io abbia mai visto" "London is the biggest city I have ever seen").

Words for "nothing" Although the Latin word for "nothing" is nihil, the common word for "nothing" became nudha in Sardinian, nada in Spanish and Portuguese, nada and ren in Galician, rien in French, res in Catalan, cosa and res in Aragonese, ren in Occitan, nimic in Romanian, and niente and nulla in Italian, gnente in Venetian, Lombard and Piedmontese (but the Piedmontese negative adverb nen cames from NE-Ente), and nue and nuie in Friulian. Some argue that all three roots derive from different parts of a Latin phrase nullam rem natam ("no thing born"), an emphatic idiom for "nothing". Meanwhile, Italian and Venetian niente and gnente would seem to be more logically derived from Latin ne(c) entem ("no being").

The number 16 Romanian constructs the names of the numbers 11–19 by a regular pattern which 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":

• "Sixteen": Catalan and Occitan setze, French seize, Italian sedici, Venetian sédexe, Romansh sedesch, Friulian sedis, Lombard sedas / sedes, Franco-Provençal sèze, Sardinian sédichi, Piedmontese sëddes.
• "Ten and six": Portuguese dezasseis or dezesseis, Galician dezaseis, Spanish dieciséis, the Marchigiano dialect digissei.
• "Six over ten": Romanian șaisprezece (where spre derives from Latin super).

Classical Latin uses the "one-ten" pattern for 11–17 (ūndecim, duodecim, ..., septendecim), but then switches to "two-off-twenty" (duodēvigintī) and "one-off-twenty" (ūndēvigintī). For the sake of comparison, note that English and German 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.

To have and to hold The verbs derived from Latin habēre "to have", tenēre "to hold", and esse "to be" are used differently in the various Romance languages, to express possession, to construct perfect tenses, and to make existential statements ("there is"). If we use T for tenēre, H for habēre, and E for esse, we have the following distribution:

• HHE: Romanian, Italian, Northern-Italian languages
• HHH: Occitan, French, Romansh.
• THH: Spanish, Catalan, Aragonese.
• TTH: European Portuguese.
• TTT: Brazilian Portuguese. (colloquial)

For example: English: I have, I have done, there is (HHE) Friulian: (jo) o ai, (jo) o ai fat, a 'nd è, al è (HHE) Venetian: (mi) go, (mi) go fat, ghe xe, ghi n'é (HHE) Lombard (Western): (mi) a gh-u, (mi) a u fai, al gh'è, a gh'è (HHE) Piedmontese: (mi) i l'hai, (mi) i l'hai fàit, a-i é (HHE) Romanian: (eu) am, (eu) am făcut, este (or e) (HHE) Italian: (io) ho, (io) ho fatto, c'è (HHE) Romansh: (jau) hai, (jau) hai fatg, igl ha (HHH) French: j'ai, j'ai fait, il y a (HHH) Catalan: (jo) tinc, (jo) he fet, hi ha (THH) Aragonese: (yo) tiengo (but (yo) he dialectally), (yo) he feito, bi ha (THH) Spanish: (yo) tengo, (yo) he hecho, hay (THH) Galician: (eu) teño, - , hai (T-H; Galician does not have a present perfect) Portuguese: (eu) tenho, (eu) tenho feito, há in Portugal (TTH) / tem in Brazil (TTT) Ancient Galician-Portuguese used to employ the auxiliary H for permanent states, such as Eu hei um nome "I have a name" (i.e. for all my life), and T for non-permanent states Eu 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. Informal Brazilian Portuguese uses the T verb even in the existential sense, e.g. Tem água no copo "There is water in the glass".In most languages, the descendant of tenēre still has the sense of "to hold", as well, e.g. Italian tieni il libro, French tu tiens le livre, Catalan tens el llibre, Romanian ine cartea, Friulian Tu tu tegnis il libri "You're holding the book". In others, like Portuguese, this sense has been mostly lost, and a different verb is currently used for "to hold".Romansh uses, besides igl ha, the form i dat (literally: it gives), borrowed from German es gibt.

To have or to be Some languages use their equivalent of "have" as an auxiliary verb to form the perfect forms (e. g. French passé 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, Italian, Northern-Italian languages (Piedmontese, Lombard, Ligurian, Venitian, Friulian), Romansh, some dialects of Catalan (although such usage is recessing in those).

In the latter, the verbs which use "be" as an auxiliary are unaccusative verbs, that is, intransitive verbs that show motion not directly initiated by the subject or changes of state, such as "fall", "come", "become". All other verbs (intransitive unergative verbs and all transitive verbs) use "have". For example, in French, J'ai vu "I have seen" vs. Je suis tombé "I am fallen" ("I have fallen"). A similar dichotomy exists in the Germanic languages, which share the same Sprachbund; German and the Scandinavian languages use "have" and "be", while modern English uses "have" only.

I did or I have done Some languages (e.g. Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Portuguese and written French and Italian) make a distinction between a preterite and a present perfect tense (cf. English I did vs. I have done). Others (spoken French, Italian and Galician) contain only one tense, which renders both meanings. French, Italian, and European Spanish use the compound past for this, while Sicilian and Latin American Spanish use the simple past.

Writing systems 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 due to Slavic influences.Also the non-Christian populations of Spain used the systems of their culture languages (Arabic alphabet and Hebrew alphabet) to write aljamiado versions of Castilian (Ladino among Sephardic Jews).

Letter values All Romance languages are written with the "core" Latin alphabet of 22 letters — A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Y, Z — subsequently alphabets derived from the Latin in various ways. In particular, the letters K and W are rarely used in most Romance languages — mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words, as they were in late Latin.

While most of the 22 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 digraph (orthography)s or trigraph (orthography)s (see below) to represent phonetic phenomena not recorded in Latin, or to get around previously established spelling conventions.

A characteristic feature of the writing systems of almost all Romance languages is that the Latin letters C and G — which originally always represented and respectively — represent other sounds when they come before E, I, and in some cases Y and Œ. This is due to a general palatalization of and before front vowels like and . This is believed to have occurred in the transition from Classical to Vulgar Latin. Since the written form of all the affected words was tied to the classical language, the shift was accommodated by a change in the pronunciation rules. However, the new sounds of C and G in those contexts differ from language to language.

The spelling rules of most Romance languages are fairly complex, and subject to considerable regional variation. To a first approximation, the phonetic representation of non-combined letters can be summarized as follows:

C: generally , but "softened" before E, I, or Y in most Romance languages — to in French, Portuguese, Occitan, Catalan, and American Spanish; to in Peninsular Spanish and Galician; to in Romansh; and to in Italian, other Romance languages in Italy and Romanian. G: generally or , but "softened" before E, I, or Y in most languages — to in French, Portuguese, Occitan and Catalan; to or in Spanish (according to dialect); to in Romansh; and to in other Romance languages in Italy and Romanian. H: silent in most languages, but represents in Romanian and Gascon Occitan. Used in various digraphs (see below). J: represents in most languages; or in Spanish; in Romansh and in several of Italy's languages, though it is normally replaced with I in native Italian words. S: normally represents (either laminal consonant or apical consonant) at syllable, but usually between vowels. :wiktionary:intervocalic s is, however, pronounced in Spanish, Romanian, Galician and several varieties of Italian. In the syllable coda, it may have special allophone pronunciations. W: used only in Walloon language. Represents in French, with the exception of words borrowed from English. X: at the beginning of words, represents ) in French, or in Spanish, and in Portuguese, Catalan, and Galician. In :wiktionary:intervocalic position, represents in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian; in Catalan, French, and Romanian; in Galician and Spanish; in Catalan, Galician and Portuguese; in Ligurian; in Venetian, French and Portuguese; or in French and Portuguese. Not used in Italian (except in borrowings), where it is replaced by s. Y: used in French and Spanish for the vowel , and also as a consonant, (esp. in French), , or . Z: in most languages; either or in Galician and Spanish; either or in Italian.

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 Aspiration (phonetics) sounds in Greek before changing to corresponding fricatives and the represented what sounded to the Romans like an following , , and respectively. Some of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:

CI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy and Romanian to represent before A, O, or U. CH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Romanian, Romansh and Sardinian language to represent before E or I; in Spanish and Galician; in Romansh before A, O or U; and in most other languages. ÇH: used in Poitevin-Saintongeais for voiceless palatal fricative DD: used in Sicilian language and Sardinian language to represent the voiced retroflex plosive . In recent history more accurately transcribed as DDH. DJ: used in Walloon for . GI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy and Romanian to represent before A, O, or U. GH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Romanian, Romansh and Sardinian language to represent before E or I, and in Galician for the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (not standard sound). GL: used in Romansh before consonants and at the end of words for . GLI: used in Italian and Romansh for . GN: used in French, Italian, Romance languages in Italy and Romansh for , as in champignon or gnocchi. GU: used before E or I to represent or in all Romance languages except Italian, Romance languages in Italy and Romanian. LH: used in Portuguese and Occitan . LL: used in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Norman and Dgèrnésiais, originally for which has merged in some cases with . Represents in French unless it follows I (i) when it represents (or in some dialects). It's used in Occitan for a geminate consonant ĿL: used in Catalan for a geminate consonant . NH: used in Portuguese and Occitan for , used in official Galician for . N-: used in Piedmontese for between two vowels. NY: used in Catalan for . QU: represents in Italian and Romance languages in Italy; in French and Spanish; (before e or i) or (normally before a or o) in Portuguese and Catalan. RR: used between vowels in several languages to denote a Trill consonant or a guttural R, instead of the Flap consonant . SC: used before E or I in Italian and Romance languages in Italy for , and in French and Spanish as in words of certain etymology. SCH: used in Romansh for or . SCI: used in Italian and Romance languages in Italy to represent before A, O, or U. SH: used in Aranese Occitan for . SS: used in French, Portuguese, Piedmontese, Occitan and Catalan for between vowels. TG: used in Romansh for . TH: used in Jèrriais for (as in English "thick"); used in Aranese for either or TSCH: used in Romansh for .

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 etymology spellings, which now represent or , , and , respectively.

Gemination For most languages in this family, geminate consonant is no longer phonemically distinctive or present. The double consonants in French spelling are due to etymology. However, Italian, Sardinian language and Sicilian do have long consonants like BB, CC, DD, etc., where the doubling indicates a short hold before the consonant is released, which often has lexical value: e.g. note ("notes") vs. notte ("night"). They may even occur at the beginning of words in Romanesco, Neapolitan and Sicilian, and are occasionally written, e.g. Sicilian cchiù (more), and ccà (here). In general, the letters B, R and Z are long at the start of a word. The double consonants in Piedmontese exist only after stressed , written and they are not ethymological: vëdde (Latin videre, to see), sëcca (Latin sicca, dry, feminine of sech). In Jèrriais, long consonants are marked with an apostrophe: S'S is a long , SS'S is a long , and T'T is a long . In Catalan and Occitan exists a geminate sound 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.

Diacritics and special characters Diacritics found in the Romance languages are the acute accent (á), the grave accent (à), the circumflex accent (â), the diaeresis (ü), the tilde (ñ), and the breve (ă). The cedilla (ç), and the Comma (punctuation)#Diacritical usage ( and , in Romanian) are used to mark sound changes due to Palatalization#Historical .28diachronic.29 palatalizations.

An accent mark placed over a vowel generally denotes Stress (linguistics), Vowel#Height, or both. In Spanish, only stress is indicated, with an acute accent. Romanian â/î and ă are central vowels; stress is not marked in this language. Catalan and Occitan regularly mark stress with an acute accent on high vowels, and with a grave accent on low vowels in a similar but not identical way. Similarly, French é is a high-mid vowel and French è is a low-mid vowel, although in French stress is not indicated with diacritics. Italian and other Romance languages in Italy mark stress with the grave accent, except on high e and o, which are sometimes marked with an acute accent. Galician marks both stress and height with an acute accent, due to the fact that only stressed vowels can be pronounced low. Portuguese marks stress with the acute accent, except for high a, e, o, which take a circumflex accent. Homophones may be differentiated by a grave accent in Italian and French, by an acute accent in Spanish or even both cases may ocur in Portuguese.

The French orthography includes the etymological Ligature (typography) œ and (more rarely) æ.

Upper and lower case Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "Letter case" of the alphabet: majuscule ("uppercase" or "capital letters"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and minuscule ("lowercase"), derived from Carolingian minuscule 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 wor

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