Romance Languages. a general name for those modern languages that are the immediate descendants of the language of ancient Rome. In those parts of the empire in which the Roman dominion and civil institutions had been most completely established the native languages were speedily and completely supplanted by that of the conquerors—the Latin. This was the case in Italy itself, in the Spanish peninsula, in Gaul or France, including parts of Switzerland, and in Dacia. When the Roman empire was broken up by the irruptions of the northern nations (in the 5th and 6th centuries) the intruding tribes stood to the Romanised inhabitants in the relation of a ruling caste to a subject population. The dominant Germans continued, where established, for several centuries to use their native tongue among themselves; but from the first they seem to have acknowledged the supremacy of the Latin for civil and ecclesiastical purposes, and at last the language of the rulers was merged in that of their subjects; not, however, without leaving decided traces of the struggle—traces chiefly visible in the intrusion of numerous German words, and in the mutilation of the grammatical forms or inflections of the ancient Latin, and the substitution therefore of prepositions and auxiliary verbs. It is also to be borne in mind that the language which underwent this change was not the classical Latin of literature, but a popular Roman language (lingua Romana rustica) which had been used by the side of the classical, and differed from it—not to the extent of being radically and grammatically another tongue—but chiefly by slovenly pronunciation, the neglect or misuse of grammatical forms, and the use of 'low' and unusual words and idioms. As distinguished from the old lingua Latina, the language of the church, the school, and the law, this newly-formed language of ordinary intercourse, in its various dialects, was known from about the 8th century as the lingua Romana; and from this name, through the adverb Romanicé, came the term Romance, applied both to the language and to the popular poetry written in it, more especially to the dialect and poems of the troubadours. The Romance languages recognised by Diez are six—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Provençal, French, and Roumanian. Ascoli and newer investigators treat the Romansch of the Grisons as a seventh sister-tongue; and each of these have more or less numerous dialects.
According to the theory of Raynouard, the new language that sprang out of the corruption of the Latin was at first essentially the same over all the countries in which Latin had been spoken, and is preserved to us in a pure state in the Provençal, or language of the troubadours; and it was from this as a common ground, and not from the original Latin, that the several Neo-Latin tongues diverged into the different forms which they now present. This theory is not accepted by recent inquirers; its groundlessness was demonstrated by Cornewell Lewis. It is beyond doubt that the several daughters of the mother Latin had their characteristic differences from the very first, as, indeed, was inevitable. The original Latin spoken in the several provinces of the Roman empire must have had very different degrees of purity, and the corruptions in one region must have differed from those in another according to the nature of the superseded tongues. To these differences in the fundamental Latin must be added those of the superadded German element, consisting chiefly in the variety of dialects spoken by the invading nations and the different proportions of the conquering population to the conquered. French, as was to be expected, is richer in German words than any other member of the family, having 450 not found in the others. Italian is next to French in this respect, but on the whole is nearest to the mother Latin. Spanish and Portuguese have considerable Arabic elements; and Roumanian was much modified by Slavic. The Romance tongues further differ from the common parent in simplifying or dropping the inflections of nouns, substituting for these the use of prepositions, and simplifying the verbal forms by a free use of auxiliary verbs. The six great Romance tongues and their literatures are treated in the articles on Italy, Spain, Portugal, Provençal, France, and Roumania, to which may be added the Romansch.
See Cornewell Lewis, On the Origin and Formation of the Romance Languages (2d ed. 1862); Diez, Grammatik der Romanischen Sprachen (1836-38; 4th ed. 1877), and his dictionary, the great Wörterbuch (1853; Eng. trans. 1864); Paul Meyer, Rapport sur le Progrès de la Philologie Romane (1874); works on Romance philology by Körting (1884), Gröber (1886), and Neumann (1886); the magazine 'Romanische Studien' (1871 et seq.), and that of Gaston Paris, 'Romania' (1873 et seq.).