The Romance languages: Typology
Johannes Kabatek, Universität Tübingen
kabatek@uni-tuebingen.de
The Romance language family is, along with Germanic, the European language family with
the highest number of speakers to be found around the world; it is a branch of Indo-European
and includes all the languages that historically evolved out of Latin. These are global
languages such as Spanish and Portuguese and (to a lesser degree) French, as well as
“smaller” languages such as Italian, Romanian, Catalan, or the lesser used Occitan, RhetoRomance, Sardinian and Galician.
In traditional, morphology-based typology, it has commonly been stated that in contrast to the
synthetic type characteristic for Latin, Romance languages are a result of “analytic
grammaticalization” and have abandoned the synthetic structures creating new, analytic
expressions for similar functions. Examples are: periphrastic future in Romance (class. Lat.
amabo / “Vulgar Latin” amare habeo > newly synthesised to Fr. j’aimerai; Sp. amaré),
prepositional case marking in Romance (class. Latin domus hominis, Fr. la maison du père /
Sp. la casa del padre), as well as other phenomena like comparison. Latin is indeed a highly
synthetic language, Romance, in contrast, has synthetic marking (gender, number) as well as
analytic elements according to a somehow “iconic” principle: those elements referring to a
category itself (gender, number) are expressed synthetically and those referring to the
relationship between an element and other elements are expressed analytically.
Romance can be regarded as a typological unit on the one hand, and on the other hand there is
a series of differences between several subtypes.
All Romance languages share the mentioned synthetic-analytic basic type, all Romance
languages (in contrast to Latin) are article languages; all Romance languages tend to present a
basic SVO word order; all Romance languages tend to prefer prototypical CV syllables.
The article will be structured as follows: After a short presentation of the Romance languages
in general, the most important common typological characteristics will be described: prosodic
elements, morphology and word formation, syntax and lexicon.
In a second step, several subtypes will be described: areal typological differences (Western
and Eastern Romance; the Balcanic type, Italo-Romance, Gallo-Romance and IberoRomance). The “general” Romance type (found in earlier stages of French, modern Italian
and Ibero-Romance) will be shown to be fundamentally different from later typological
restructuring as can be found above all in Modern French (predetermination, articles as
gender and number markers, obligatory overt subject marking) and, to a lesser degree, in
Brazilian Portuguese. Another subgroup is the “lateral type” including Romanian and IberoRomance with DOM (direct object marking) and other common features.