Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries.
Generally, the Gallo-Romance languages (discussed further below) form the core "innovative" languages, with standard French often considered the most innovative of all. The phenomenon is attributed to language development in the Carolingian Empire with Northern Italy and Catalan region representing marginal areas of distribution.
Most Romance languages have similar sets of consonants. The following is a combined table of the consonants of the five major Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian). Key: bold: Appears in all 5 languages. italic: Appears in 3–4 languages. (parentheses): Appears in 2 languages.
French (français ⓘ or langue française [lɑ̃ɡ fʁɑ̃sɛːz] ⓘ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family.Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire.
The Gallo-Romance languages are generally considered the most innovative (least conservative) among the Romance languages. Northern France, the medieval area of the langue d'oïl from which modern French developed, was the epicentre. Characteristic Gallo-Romance features generally developed the earliest, appear in their most extreme ...
Occitan (English: / ˈ ɒ k s ɪ t ən,-t æ n,-t ɑː n /; [12] [13] Occitan pronunciation: [utsiˈta, uksiˈta]), [a] also known as lenga d'òc (Occitan: [ˈleŋɡɒ ˈðɔ(k)] ⓘ; French: langue d'oc) by its native speakers, sometimes also referred to as Provençal, is a Romance language spoken in Southern France, Monaco, Italy's Occitan Valleys, as well as Spain's Val d'Aran in Catalonia ...
In the 9th century, romana lingua (the term used in the Oaths of Strasbourg of 842) was the first of the Romance languages to be recognized by its speakers as a distinct language, probably because it was the most different from Latin compared with the other Romance languages (see History of the French language).
In addition to French, several regional languages are also spoken to varying degrees, such as Alsatian, a German dialect (specifically Alemannic; spoken by 1.44% of the national population); Basque, a language isolate; Breton, a Celtic language (spoken by 0.61%); Corsican, an Italo-Dalmatian language; and various other Gallo-Romance languages ...