ABSTRACT
Branch of Indo-European which developed from Italic, particularly from Latin and its various regional forms in the territories conquered by Rome (Vulgar Latin). A division is generally made between East Romance languages (Rumanian, Italian) and West Romance languages (Gallo-Romance, IberoRomance, and Rhaeto-Romance languages) based on phonological and morphological criteria (e.g. voicing or deletion of intervocalic voiceless stops in West Romance and the loss of final [s] in East Romance: Span. sabéis vs Ital. sapete ‘you (pl.) know,’ Span. las casas vs Ital. le case ‘the houses’). Included in Gallo-Romance are French, Occitan, and FrancoProvençal, while Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan belong to Ibero-Romance. Some of the main factors contributing to the individual development of each territory include substratum and superstratum influences, the date of Romanization, and the extent of relations with Rome. The language which has changed the most from Latin is French, which underwent a thorough typological transformation (heavy loss of inflectional morphology due to the loss of final syllables and their replacement by elements such as personal pronouns, articles, prepositions, auxiliaries). In contrast, the southern Romance languages such as Spanish and Italian, as well as Rumanian, are much closer to Latin. Sardinian has a particularly conservative phonological inventory, and does not fit easily into the East/West distinction.
