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 Switzer land, 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 Romanized inhabitants in the re lation of a ruling caste to a subject population. The dominant Germans con tinued, 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 in trusion of numerous German words, and in the mutilation of the grammatical forms or inflections of the ancient Latin, and the substitution therefor of prepo sitions 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 rad ically and grammatically another tongue —but chiefly by slovenly pronunciation, the neglect or misuse of grammatical forms, and the use of "low" and unu sual 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 Romania, came the term romance, applied both to the lan guage and to the popular poetry written in it, more especially to the dialect and poems of the troubadours. The Ro
mance languages recognized by Diez are six—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Pro vencal, French, and Rumanian. Ascoli and newer investigators treat the Ro mansch of the Grisons as a seventh sister-tongue; and each of these have more or less numerous dialects.
The original Latin spoken in the sev eral provinces of the Roman empire must have had very different degrees of pu rity, and the corruption in one region must have differed from those in an other according to the nature of the superseded tongues. To these differ ences in the fundamental Latin must be added those of the superadded German element, consisting chiefly in the variety of dialects spoken by the invading na tions and the different proportions of the conquering population to the con quered. 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 consider able Arabic elements; and Rumanian was much modified by Slavic. The Ro mance tongues further differ from the common parent in other details. The six great Romance tongues and their literatures are treated in the articles on Italy, Spain, Portugal, Provençal, Fraace, and Rumania, to which may be added the Romansch.