Languages of the family

What constitutes a language, as distinct from a dialect, is a vexing question, and opinion varies on just how many Romance languages are spoken today. The political definition of a language—one that is accepted as standard by a nation or people—is the least ambiguous one; according to that definition, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian are certainly languages and possibly also Romansh (since 1996 a semiofficial language of Switzerland, probably related to other Rhaetian dialects spoken in Italy) and Catalan (the official language of Andorra and the joint official language [together with Spanish] of the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands). On linguistic grounds Sardinian (not the language of an independent nation since the 14th century) and Occitan (the medieval Provençal) are usually regarded as languages rather than dialects. The Rhaetian dialects of Italy (Ladin in the Dolomites and Friulian around Udine) are sometimes regarded as non-Italian, sometimes as dialects of the Italian language. Sicilian is different enough from northern and central Italian dialects to be given separate status often, but in Italy all neighbouring dialects are mutually intelligible, with differences becoming more marked with geographic distance. Franco-Provençal (the name given to a group of dialects spoken around the Alpine region of France and Italy) is often considered to be different from both French and Occitan, though some linguists hold that it is merely a transitional dialect. In the 21st century, few of the French know Franco-Provençal, though it still survives in Italy’s Valle d’Aosta region (where French, rather than Italian, remains the language of culture). Asturian and Galician (both spoken in Spain and Portugal), Corsican (France and Italy), and Piemontese, or Piedmontese (Italy), were once considered dialects of national languages, but by the 21st century they were considered distinct enough from the languages of their respective countries to be granted the status of languages. Other “dialects” also are fighting for “language” status on the basis of their written traditions or the active promotion of their use in writing.

Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino (not to be confused with Ladin), was once regarded not as an independent language but as an archaic form of Castilian Spanish preserving many features of the 15th-century language that was current when the Jews were expelled from Spain. There are some 100,000 to 200,000 speakers, mostly originating in the Balkans and Asia Minor but, after World War II, concentrated in Israel; most now reside in Israel, and others live in Turkey.

Some linguists believe that creoles are often different languages from their metropolitan counterparts. Haitian Creole, for instance, is said to be mutually unintelligible with French. Intelligibility varies so much with the speaker and the hearer, however, that it is difficult to formulate firm criteria on that basis.

Many Romance dialects literally or virtually ceased to be spoken in the 20th century. Of these, Dalmatian is the most striking, its last known speaker, one Tuone Udaina (Italian Antonio Udina), having been blown up by a land mine in 1898. He was the main source of knowledge for his parents’ dialect (that of the island of Veglia [modern Krk], though he was hardly an ideal informant. Vegliot Dalmatian was not his native language, and he had learned it only from listening to his parents’ private conversations. Moreover, he had not spoken the language for 20 years at the time he acted as an informant, and he was deaf and toothless as well. Most of the other evidence for Dalmatian derives from documents from Zara (modern Zadar) and Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) dating to the 13th–16th centuries. It is possible that, apart from isolated pockets, the language was then replaced by Croatian and, to a lesser extent, by Venetian (a dialect of Italian). It is certain, even from scanty evidence, that Dalmatian was a language in its own right, noticeably different from other Romance languages.

On the Istrian Peninsula of Croatia close to the island of Krk, another Romance variety precariously survives with probably fewer than one thousand speakers; known as Istriot, it may be related to Vegliot. Though some scholars connect it with Rhaetian Friulian dialects or with Venetian dialects of Italian, others maintain that it is an independent language. There are no texts except those collected by linguists. A little farther north in the same peninsula, another Romance dialect, Istro-Romanian (with about 300 mother tongue speakers in the second decade of the 21st century), is threatened with extinction. Usually classified as a Romanian dialect, it may have been carried to the Istrian Peninsula by Romanians from the northwestern part of the Balkan Peninsula who took refuge from the Turks in the 16th and 17th centuries; it has undergone strong Croatian influence. The first evidence of its existence is a short list of words in a historical work of 1698; there are also collections of folklore texts from the 19th century, but it is otherwise unwritten. Another isolated Romanian dialect that may be nearing extinction is Megleno-Romanian, spoken mainly in Kilkís prefecture, Greece, just west of the Vardar River, on the border between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece. In 1914 there were 13,000 speakers, but many emigrated to Asia Minor, other parts of what was once Yugoslavia, and Romania, where small pockets survive (they numbered about 5,000 speakers in the early 21st century). The only texts are those transcribed from oral traditions.

Other Romance tongues earlier ceased to be spoken. There is evidence, for instance, of an Ibero-Romance dialect spoken in Arab-occupied Spain until shortly after its reconquest by the Spanish, accomplished at the end of the 15th century. Usually known as Mozarabic, from the Arabic word meaning “Arabized person,” or as ʿajamī (“barbarian language”), it was originally the spoken language of the urban bourgeoisie, who remained Christian while the peasantry generally converted to Islam, but it appears that many Arabs also came to speak Mozarabic. Because most of the evidence, apart from a 15th-century glossary from Granada, is written in Arabic script (which uses no vowel signs), it is difficult to reconstruct the phonology of the language, but it appears to be a very conservative Ibero-Romance dialect. Much of modern information about Mozarabic comes from medical and botanical works that give Mozarabic terms alongside the Arabic. To this was added the discovery of Mozarabic refrains (kharjahs) attached to Arabic love ballads (muwashshaḥs) of the 11th and 12th centuries; study of these began only in 1948. For much of the Muslim period (beginning in 711), Christians were treated tolerantly and became culturally Arabized. Even after persecution by zealous Muslim newcomers in the 12th century, the Mozarabs were often in conflict with Westernized “liberators” from the north. Their language died out soon after the Arabs were driven out of Spain at the end of the 15th century, though it is sometimes claimed that Mozarabic has left its mark on the dialects of southern Spain and Portugal.

Other Romance varieties may have developed in peripheral regions of the Roman Empire only to die out under pressure from neighbouring non-Italic languages; these regions are called Romania submersa by specialists. Often these extinct Romance varieties are known from words borrowed into surviving languages; the Afro-Asiatic Amazigh (Berber) languages, for instance, bear witness to the long and brilliant Roman period in North Africa that ended in the 7th century ce with Arab invasions, and the Brythonic, or British Celtic, languages (especially Welsh) retain many traces of what appears to have been a conservative Romance dialect, otherwise eliminated by Anglo-Saxon in the 5th century. Albanian contains so many Romance words that some style it “semi-Romance,” and farther north, in what was formerly the Roman province of Pannonia (corresponding to modern western Hungary and parts of eastern Austria, Slovenia, and northern Serbia), Romance speech was probably not dead at the time of the Magyar invasion at the end of the 10th century. Thus, there is reason to believe that Romance dialects may have been spoken at one time over much of southeastern Europe. It is also evident that Romance languages have been retreating south before German for some time, and it is probable that Romance tongues were used in the whole of Switzerland and parts of Bavaria and Austria until roughly the 9th to 10th century.