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

Romance languages

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Alternative Title: Romanic languages

Romance languages, group of related languages all derived from Vulgar Latin within historical times and forming a subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The major languages of the family include French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, all national languages. Catalan also has taken on a political and cultural significance; among the Romance languages that now have less political or literary significance or both are the Occitan and Rhaetian dialects, Sardinian, and Dalmatian (extinct), among others. Of all the so-called families of languages, the Romance group is perhaps the simplest to identify and the easiest to account …(100 of 14748 words)

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