ROMANIC 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 estab lished, the native languages were speedily and completely supplanted by that of the conquerors--4-the Latin. This was the case in Italy itself, in the Spanish peninsula, in Gaul or France, including parts of Switzerland, and in Dacia (see under "MotnAvrA). When the Roman empire was broken up by the irruptions of the northern nations Oh the 5th and 6th centuries), the intruding tribes stood to the Romanized inhabitants in the relation of a ruling caste to a subject population. The dominant Germans continued 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 therefor of prepositions and 1.uxiliary verbs. It is also to be borne in mind that the language which underwent this change was not classical Latin of literature, but a popular Roman language (lingua ,Romana s-ustica) 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, as some writers unwarrantably conclude—but chiefly by slovenly pronunciation, the neglect or misuse of grammatical forms; and the use of "low" and unusual words and idioms. As dis tinguished from the old lingua Latina, the language of the church, the school, and the law, ihiS newly-formed language of ordinary intercourse in its 'various dialects was known as, the lingua Romana ; and from this name, probably through the adverb romaniee, came the term romance (Prov. and 0. Fr. romans, Sp. romance, It. romanzo), applied both to the language and to the popular poetry written in it. more especially to
the dialect and productions of the troubadours in the south of France.
According to the theory of Raynouard (q.v.), 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 Provencal or language of the troubadours; and it was from this as a common ground; and not from the original Latin, tbat the several Neo-Latin tongues diverged into the different forms they now present. This theory is not accepted by more recent inquirers; its groundlessness has been demonstrated by sir G. Coruewall Lewis in his elaborate Essay on the Origin and Formation of time Romance Languages (2d ed. Loud. 1862). 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 conquer ing population 'to the conquered. French; e.g., 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. There are about 900 in the Romaine languages altogether, of which about 300 are common to them all. A great many of these words are terms relating to warfare.
The varieties of speech originating in the way now described (which first received the general name of Romanic* languages in recent times from German scholars—RD-man ioc/a Sprachen) are.divided by Diez into six jurisdictions: 1. The Italian, preserving, as was to be expected, the traits of the mother Latin in more recognizable form than any of the sister tongues. It present a variety of strongly marked dialects.