ABSTRACT
At the 1968 International Romance Linguistics Congress in Bucharest, Joe Cremona presented a short but original paper on the classification of Romance and the particular position of Tuscan. Part of his hypothesis was that the northern group had innovated away from the south, impelled by contact with Germanic. Reinforcement of the kind requires long periods of bilingualism. Otherwise, the interference that arises spontaneously in the speech of adult second language learners is prone to be regarded as deviant and to be edited out by the next generation of native learners. A tentative typology of the approaches favoured by Romanists over the past forty years might distinguish some broad groupings, one of which subdivides into two along methodological lines. Overall, holistic typologies have proved less useful for classificatory purposes than might have been hoped. Perhaps the reason lies in the persistent fundamental unity of Romance.
