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| Image by KayYen |
There are 5 major Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian) and several minority Romance languages (such as Sardinian, Sicilian and Occitan). Romance languages are split into two groups, Western and Eastern. Western Romance languages include Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, while Romanian is an Eastern Romance language.
Grammar:
There is a common belief that Romanian is the closest language to Latin, but Romanian is probably only the closest in grammar. Romanian preserved certain features of Vulgar Latin grammar that other Romance languages lost. For example, Romanian has three genders (Masculine, Feminine and Neuter) and kept all six Latin cases.
But, the pronunciation and vocabulary is not as similar to Latin when compared to Italian or Spanish. This is because Romanian was influenced by the surrounding Slavic languages.
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| Image by Mario Sánchez Prada |
Pronunciation:
According to Wikipedia, Sardinian is the closest living language to Latin in phonology.
There are ten vowels in Latin; a,e,i,o,u (short) and a,e,i,o,u (long). In continental Romance languages the short vowels e,i,o and u evolved into different sounds while in Sardinian the short vowels evolved and pronounced as long vowels. This probably helped to retain the original pronunciation.
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| Image by Piermario |
Vocabulary:
According to Wikipedia, Italian is the closest living language to Latin in vocabulary. This is because other Romance languages were influenced by their native Germanic, Slavic or Celtic languages such but in Rome, Latin was their native language.
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| Image by Gerald Queen |
Heritage:
Sardinian is the least evolved Romance language because the island was isolated from the changes that continental Vulgar Latin went through.
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| Romance Language 'Family Tree' |
According to a study by Mario Pei, this is the percentage of difference between Romance languages and Latin:
Sardinian 8%,
Italian 12%,
Spanish 20%,
Romanian 23.5%,
Occitan 25%,
Portuguese, 31%,
French 44%
So, the major Romance languages in order of closeness to Latin are Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese and French.
Personally, I don't find it surprising that Italian is the closest because Latin originally came from Italy.
More information and resource list:
Comparative grammar of the Romance languages - Nativlang
The Grammar of Romance and Vulgar Latin - Nativlang
Vulgar Latin - Wikipedia
Romanian grammar - Wikipedia
Classification of Romance languages - Wikipedia
Romance languages - Wikipedia
Hey nice blog post, I was just wondering this and you gave a great answer.
ReplyDeleteI don't trust this answer! I have seem several different answers to this questions. I speak portuguese (Native), Spanish, Italian, and French and the feeling I have is in fact that Italian is the closest language to latin but in the second place would be Portuguese followed by Spanish and French!
DeleteDo you have evidence that Portuguese is closer to Latin than Spanish? I'd love to see some examples.
DeleteI'd love to see this debate take place but it seems like someone isn't willing to gather enough evidence to counter act the challenge.
DeleteDid Vulgar Latin (in the sense of a single language) ever exist? In some places we see languages which people say barely changed and in other places sudden rapid changes happened due to outside influences. Why assume there was a single vulgar Latin in the first place? In the case of Spain you had large numbers of Italian colonists whereas in France you had a large Celtic (and possibly some kind of Germanic speaking population) already there. The word Celtic is also misleading since speakers of pretty different languages all got put in the same category. I imagine French was always French kind of like Hinglish and Singlish have odd sounding accents because the speakers are coming from another language and bilingual. There is no vulgar English that later separated into different languages. What you have are different colonization events that occurred in different places at different times. Portugal was conquered about 200 years later than Spain which likely is a huge a reason for the dramatically different Portuguese accent.
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DeleteFrench, Romanian and Portuguese likely fall into this category. Spanish, Italian and Sardinian are probably about how Latin was spoken in daily conversation by the time of the colonization of Spain. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-03/hinglish-hindi-english-hybrid-language-popular-in-india/8158746
DeleteYou are all wrong. Spanish is the best. God made the best football players speak Spanish. This is evidence that Spanish is the best. Gods language.
DeleteIt is now confirmed that the best football players do not speak Spanish. Maybe they speak Russian.
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DeleteSorry to disappoint you all folks, but both Italian and Romanian are the closest to the Latin language followed by Spanish, Portuguese and French. What do I base my conclusion on?
DeleteI am Romanian by birth, and spent at one time 3 months in Italy: in these 3 months I learnt to speak Italian almost perfectly. I have forgotten most of it since - it has been 30+ years. I deal almost on a daily basis with Spanish speaking people, and although I've never learned Spanish, I can figure out how to speak and make myself very well understood in Spanish. Recently I was able to converse with a group of Portuguese speaking Brazilians fairly easy. At one point I spoke apart from Romanian, French, Italian, Greek, and I can count in Spanish, and full English, so I can claim I have some knowledge about languages.
Great post!
ReplyDeleteThank you :)
DeleteEntiendo that Italian es tre bien mas like latin.lol
ReplyDeleteEntiendo that Italian es tre bien mas like latin.lol
ReplyDeleteWhat about catalan?
ReplyDeleteSorry about that, I only mentioned the major languages that I wanted to discuss in the post. I will make an updated version of the image with Catalan and Occitan in the future.
DeleteI was also surprised that Catalan didn't appear here. There are about 7 million speakers -including me. I had read somewhere that Catalan is very close to Latin - not sure if that is vocabulary or grammar.
Deletecatalan and occitan are romance languagges too -.-
ReplyDeleteCatalan is a Gallo-Romance language and Occitan is part of the Occitano-Romance language group. In the image, I only included major languages I wanted to discuss in the post. I did include the percentage of difference between Occitan and Latin. I will make an updated version of the image to include Catalan and Occitan.
DeleteGreat post! Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThank you :) I'm glad you like it.
DeleteRomanian has only 5 cases at most - while I would even go so far as to say that there are really only 3 cases since the nomenative and accusative have the same form, and the genetive and the dative also have the same form. So saying they have kept all 6 cases from laten is simply wrong.
ReplyDeleteYes Richard, in Romanian there are 5 cases, not 6. The nominative and accusative does not have the same form. The genitive and dative have the same form only on singular and only unarticulated. Well, it may look strange for a foreigner, but not to a romance speaker :)
Deleteyou should learn some grammar . romanian one. might not make sense to you,because u are an english speaker and u cannot grasp these notions. but those cases are very very different. just like an english lad i met, can t grasp the notion of the use of a neutral gender. or we even have respectful pronons. liek we don t adress older ppl at the singular person. something else to dwell on. don t say they are the same, cuz they are not the same. there are differences, and just cuz u can t
Deleteunderstand them doesn t mean they re not there
lol. in latin there were 8 cases actually . i just saw your comment. 8 cases. and we kept them all mostly until a certain time. now we have 6 or 7 left. it s nomitav, acuzativ, genitiv, dativ , ablativ ( we learned in school and even at olympics we had the cazul ablativ), vocativ and that s 6. and if i count genitiv-dativ as a case, witch should be like that cuz it is still a particular case, then it s 7. we used to have instrumental and locativ , but not anymore. serious arrogance from english ppl .
DeleteHello Iustin, as I tend to agree with your comment, regarding Romanian grammatical, and as we may observe that our mother language is actually a 2000 year old language, simple due to its phonetic direct writing, yet complicated due to its required communication complexity, English is a relatively young language, with more simple/direct application. Yet all comments we make here should be respectful: many of us are not native English speakers, and some speak the off-shoot English (called American-English) or other English related language (Australian, New Zealand, etc). As I have relative good knowledge of at leas 5 other languages, I can vouch that being able to communicate in whichever language, regardless of the mistakes one makes, is appreciated in all cultures in this world. Take care.
DeleteI, too, enjoyed your work. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteThe article is good and Mario Pei´s research results look trustworthy. Italian is by far the closest to Latin of major languages. And Frech is farthest to Latin of major languages. Mari Messias is simply wrong in this case.
ReplyDeleteNice article! Add Galacian while you're at it.
ReplyDeleteWhat about Romansh?
ReplyDeleteYeah Romansh is the closest. Should have been on the list.
DeleteIsnt English suppose to be 60% Latin based.(Dont know if that is factually based or theory)
ReplyDeleteWe learned that 60% of English's vocabulary comes directly or (mostly) indirectly (e.g., via Norman French, Parisian French, Spanish, etc.) from Latin.
DeleteBut English is not a Romance language; it is a Germanic language (and a Western Germanic language at that). Thus, it has a lot of grammatical elements in common with Dutch, German, etc.
Also, if you look at the majority of the simple, common words that we use in English, they're more similar to simple, common German words. But if you include longer and/or more technical words, they tend to have a Latin/French/Romance origin. (Interestingly but not surprisingly, German and Dutch have also borrowed heavily from Latin and French over the centuries. Now they also share a lot of technical words with us all.)
60 percent of English is of French and Latin origin but NOT Spanish. No need for me to explain this since I have a feeling you already knew.
DeleteDear friend ,
ReplyDeleteWould you help me with letting me know the source of the Mario pei's research on the percentage of differences between Latin and It's daughters ?
I relly need it for my dissertation .
This is my Email Add : ohlife5382@gmail.com
tnx
Hello. Here are the sources:
DeleteItalica: Bulletin of the American Association of Teachers of Italian. 27–29. Menasha, Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing Company. 1950. Retrieved November 18, 2013.
Koutna, Olga (December 31, 1990). "Chapter V. Renaissance: On the History of Classifications in the Romance Language Group". In Niederehe, Hans-Josef; Koerner, E.F.K. History and Historiography of Linguistics: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS IV), Trier, 24–28 August 1987. Volume 1: Antiquitity–17th Century. Amsterdam, The Netherlands / Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 294. ISBN 9027278113. Retrieved November 18, 2013.
This can be found on this Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Romance_languages
If there were only one Romance language, it would be called Modern Latin. Modern Irish seems, at first, second, and third glance, to bear little relationship to Old Latin but it's called Irish. (Gaeilge) I've heard people ask why Latin is not still spoken since Greek still is. If Greek had produced as many children as Latin did, we'd be referring to the many Hellenic languages as we do of the many ROmance languages.
ReplyDeleteGood point. And don't forget English and other languages. Modern English is about as far from "Old English" as any of these modern romance languages are from Latin -- in both grammar and pronunciation, and decidedly in vocabulary. And, English has had less time to accomplish the feat.
DeleteMaybe one day English dialects will separate so much they split into many "Anglic languages".
DeleteVery interesting, especially for me as Englishman who lives in Sardinia and studied Latin at school many years ago. Nowadays Sardinia is a part of Italy so everybody there speaks Italian but a high percentage of Sardinians still speak Sardinian or 'Sardo'. I remember buying a little Italian-Sardinian dictionary and being amazed when looking at the conjugation of the present tense of the verb 'amare' and seeing how it was identical, but for the second person plural, to the Latin version that I'd learnt as an 11-year-old!
ReplyDeleteVery nice post, so thanks for sharing it. I agree with you, I'd say that perhaps Romanian is the closest living language to Latin in terms of grammar, but as you mentioned, it is very far from it when it comes to vocabulary. As for Italian (I am a native speaker myself) I feel like that in terms of vocab, it is for sure the closest to Latin (and Sardinian, too - but I would't call it a major Romance language). I remember studying Latin in high school, and being amazed at how many words I could understand without using a dictionary, but of course things were different when faced with Latin grammar. However, I think it is strange that French is the furthest Romance language when compared to Latin, yet it is the closest to Italian when it comes to vocabulary. Don't you think so?
ReplyDeleteSpanish is the closest to Italian in terms of vocabulary.
DeleteIt's funny to me as a Spanish native speaker that I can understand far more of Italian than I can of French despite Spanish and French coming from a dialect that had already separated from the one that became Italian.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting blog. Thank you for posting. I do have a question. Is Serbian part of the Romance family? If so, how close would it be to Latin? Also, I would love to have historical references that explain the evolution of all the Romance languages. If anyone could share some information I would greatly appreciate it. oscarami72@gmail.com
ReplyDeleteThanks Oskey. Serbian is Slavic and isn't part of the Romance family. Latin and Serbian are related through Pro-Indo-European. However, there are many words in Serbian (and other Slavic languages) of Latin origin, this is due to the use of Latin in science and technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_language
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian
Romanian is spoken by Vlach/Romanian minorities in Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia and Croatia.( over 1 million inhabitants) It is spoken by Romanian minorities in Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and Czech Republic.
ReplyDeleteYou must be referring to Aromâni or Armâni... In that case I'd suggest that they make a decision, because if you ask them, they're of Greek descent speaking an of-shoot of Greek... not Latin. Or they could be of Greek descent, but speaking a Latin related language? - that may be an acceptable compromise, I suspect.
DeleteArmãn'i are neither Romanian nor Greek. Maybe related to the Macedons (non-Greek:)
DeleteIn terms of vocabulary Italian is the closest, and French is the next closest. But French is the least like latin in terms of pronunciation.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but that is not correct. See my post above and other's opinions.
DeleteNoup,French is like the adopted child in the Latin family while the others are pure blood latin sister countries.Also from all the latins french are the most c...k s...s of them all.Have been traveling to all the Latin countries including France ,very disappointed by this nation ,as they think about themselves the best country in the world which obviously it s not even in top 50
Deletewhat??
DeleteThe sardinian language is the closest. still alive, still spoken by Sardinians
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe answer is relatively simple, each Romance language retains some things from ancient Latin that the others may not. If your native language is a Romance language, or you studied one relatively well, you can read and pick out words,phrases and passages in Latin that you can comprehend or figure out to make sense.However, without good knowledge of Latin itself, one could not read and understand it fully.After all, it is an ancient language and has been "dead" for centuries !
ReplyDeleteFor the results to be less biassed, it would be interesting to compare latin to each country old language pool, before the standardization of the vocabulary which imported words from other languages. For example, in romanian there were two main periods that influenced the language. First, the use of the slavon-chirilic alphabet and second, the use of the latin alphabet. So I think that collecting the archaic words would be a better approach. Im sure the result would be more interesting. :)
ReplyDeleteIs latin t like spanish or english hard t?
ReplyDeletebad scheeme of Romance languages: missing Aromanian !
ReplyDeleteIn that case I'd suggest that Aromânii, or Armânii make a choice, because if you ask them, they're of Greek descent speaking an of-shoot of Greek... not Latin. Or they could be of Greek descent, but speaking a Latin related language? - that may be an acceptable compromise, I suspect.
Deletebad scheeme of Romance languages: missing Aromanian !
ReplyDeleteClosest living languages to Latin are: italian language (first) , romanian language (second), spanish language (third)
ReplyDeletewrong. closest living languages are:
DeleteSardinian
Italian
and so on
Sorry the closest is Romanch, which is spoken in canton of Graubünden. It is essentially vulgar latin. This is well known. Roman soldiers were isolated in mountain villages. It changed very little
DeleteAnother interesting ling between Romanian and Wales' Celtic language, for those interested, see link included (sorry it's in Romanian and I am not dertain of it's validity) : https://www.realitatea.net/asemanare-intre-tatal-nostru-in-romana-si-celta-iata-care-este-de-fapt-adevarul_1643440.html?fbclid=IwAR1Lq52vVtU8D14P1e4ySA3TaXArAhR9GveuHDGM7a9pIR-EKZxynzk7SKQ
ReplyDeleteOne more trivia I've collect along the years: there is a German minority, speaking old and now altered Romanian language, somewhere in Germany. I watched an entire tv show dedicated to the similarities on etymology and morphology of this now endangered language. If I find it, I'll post it here.
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DeleteThat is certainly not the Lords prayer in any celtic language that's for sure... Funnily enough though, Welsh inherited a lot of Latin nouns for new ideas... Many verbs and adjectives are celtic, but I'd say 50% of our nouns descend from the romance languages in general, and Latin in particular!
DeleteThe closest is Sardinian language. then, italian
ReplyDeleteSorry the closest is Romanch, which is spoken in canton of Graubünden. It is essentially vulgar latin. This is well known. Roman soldiers were isolated in mountain villages. It changed very little
DeleteSorry the closest is Romanch, which is spoken in canton of Graubünden. It is essentially vulgar latin. This is well known. Roman soldiers were isolated in mountain villages. It changed very little
ReplyDeleteHow similar your current language is to that of the invadors who conquered your ancestors is only interesting for a tourist, during its initial time in the country. What is really interesting is the quality of life most people have in that country.
ReplyDeleteThe closest language to latin is vulgar latin. and who knows what was vulgar latin those times and how it changed? thousands of theories... Nobody can prove a thing. Linguistics, history, archaeology and other sciences are at different sides on this matter. History was written by the winners. Maybe 3 or 2 thousands years ago we were speaking various forms of one language and we were able to understand each other. These talks lead nowhere. Have a good life everyone!
ReplyDeleteThe Roman's that migrated to Spain were from eastern Greek speaking Rome - ergo Spanish is phonetically equivalent to GREEK. Upper class Roman's spoke Latin with a Greek accent after ~BC0AD.
ReplyDeleteVulger Italian of the Legionares that conquored and moved in on Portugal were more like Occitanian. Southern French sounds like Detroit. In 1950s Santa Clara CA USA the Mexicans sounded like "Ladino-Malaga-Greek" while the Portugese sounded "gruff-gangsta-Occ 0ccitan-SouthernFrench"
Portuguese may be far removed from Latin, but because of all the -m endings, it *looks* superficially like Latin. :)
ReplyDelete(and it was because of this that I googled and ultimately found this lovely article, thank you!)
From this text , there is clear that in order to make thois comparison and draw a conclusion, a certain number of criteria were established. From the point of view of each criterium, different languages are „closest” to Latin.
ReplyDeleteIn order to combine these criteria and draw a final conclusion it is a question of what weight one put for each citeria and ponder them.
English has a tremendous number of Latin (direct or indirect) words, but ypou van not understand it. Do you know why ? Because of the grammar. A language is more stable as its grammar is stable and beginns to change when grammar begins to change. Everyone here experimented in his own contries that whe moving to various region, they had a problem in the beginning understanding the local verncular. That was due to different words and different pronounciation. Once they learned the local words and pronounciation, there was no longer a problem. Why ? Because the grammar was the same.
Absolutely pent subject matter, appreciate it for selective information . 검증사이트
ReplyDeleteThis comment section is in dire need for cleaning, until then, unsubscribed.
ReplyDeletePortuguese is extremely similar to Latin. Virtually every word is derived from Latin: eu tenho um livro na mão = ego teneo unum librum in illa manu ‘I am holding a book in my hand’. Even the verb endings are just like Latin: tenho = teneo, tens = tenes, tem = tenet, temos = tenemus, têm = tenent, ter = tenere and so on. So if you know Latin, it won’t take long to learn.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the pronunciation is a bit difficult. There are nine ordinary vowels as well as various nasal vowels and diphthongs. What’s more, some of the vowels are swallowed up by neighbouring consonants (for example, ovos ‘eggs’ is pronounced ovsh). Basically, European Portuguese sounds as if Latin is being spoken by someone who is slightly drunk. Wine is cheap and freely available in Portugal, so I suspect this is not far from the truth.