With Good Reason

When most of us think of the Romance languages, what usually comes to mind are the “Big Five:” French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian. All of them have a country to themselves, even if some of them share it with speakers of other tongues, such as German in Italy’s Trentino-Alto Adige region near the Austrian border. But there are other Romance languages as well. Unlike the Big Five, they can’t be matched with a nation bearing their name. Nor have they enjoyed the fortune of expanding overseas, either through colonial activity (as with French, Spanish and Portuguese) or through its status as the international language of music (Italian). However, these “other” members of the Romance family boast an interesting history and in many cases a rich literature. So it behoves us to examine each one of these languages in greater detail.

Galician is spoken in the region of Galicia – not to be confused with the region of the same name in Eastern Europe – in Northwest Spain. It separated from Portuguese around the late Middle Ages, and some linguists still view it as a dialect of the latter language. Whether dialect or separate language, Galician resembles Portuguese more than it does Spanish. For example, the word for “milk” is “leite” in both Galician and Portuguese but “leche” in Spanish. Galician is an official language of Spain.

Catalan is the mother tongue of a sixth of Spain’s inhabitants. As its name implies, it is spoken principally in the northeast Spanish region of Catalonia. It is also used in the Balearic Islands; Valencia; the nation of Andorra; Southern France; and the city of Alghero in Sardinia, a former Spanish colony. Catalan enjoys official status in Spain together with Galician, Basque (a non-Romance language), and Castilian Spanish. There are a number of newspapers, television stations and other media in Catalan. A well-known native speaker of the language was architect Antoní Gaudí.

Occitan, spoken mainly in Southern France, in Monaco, and in parts of Northern Italy and Spain, is closely related to Catalan. Though the name “Occitan” is often used interchangeably with “Provençal,” strictly speaking the latter refers to a specific dialect of Occitan. In the Middle Ages Occitan was known as the “langue d’oc” from the word “oc” for “yes,” as distinguished from the “langue d’oïl” (Modern French “oui”) in Northern France. During this period Occitan flourished as a literary medium, being the language of the troubadours. It subsequently declined as a written language but was revived somewhat in the late 19th century by the poet and Nobel Prize recipient Frédéric Mistral. Occitan is estimated to be the mother tongue of as many as two million people today.

Sardinian is spoken on the island of Sardinia off the coast of Italy and by Sardinian emigrants abroad. Together with Italian Sardinian has official status on the island. Because Sardinian has always been physically isolated from the rest of the Romance world, it has conserved many features of the original language, Latin. For instance, Sardinians pronounce “c” before “e” and “i” as a hard “k” whereas standard Italian speakers say “ch” as in “chat.” This led linguists to conclude that Latin words like “centum” (hundred) were pronounced “KEN-tum” rather than “CHEN-tum.” Sardinian is also believed to have borrowed words from a non-Indo-European language similar to Basque which may have been spoken on the island prior to the arrival of the Romans. One such term is “bega” (wet plain), like the Spanish “vega” (whence the name “Las Vegas”) with the same meaning.

Rhaeto-Romance is used in parts of Switzerland and Italy. Though it has been designated as an official language in the former country, only about 1% of the national population speaks it as a mother tongue. The Friulian dialect in Northern Italy is considered by some as a form of Rhaeto-Romance. To illustrate the differences between Friulian and standard Italian, compare the words “Fogular Furlan” (the name of a Friulian organization in Canada which translates into English literally as “Friulian hearth”) and the latter language’s “Focolare Friulano.” Rhaeto-Romance has had a flourishing literature since the 1100s. One celebrity of Rhaeto-Romance descent is actor James Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

The list includes the now-extinct Dalmatian, which was spoken in the region of Dalmatia on the western Croatian coast. A relic of Roman colonization, Dalmatian was gradually overwhelmed by Serbo-Croatian, and its last native speaker died at the end of the nineteenth century.

The future of the surviving “other” Romance tongues seems assured, even though they will likely remain local languages. Their failure to extend beyond their borders stems less from weaknesses in the languages themselves than from the fact that their speakers never had the opportunity to carry out the colonial ventures that their French, Spanish and Portuguese counterparts did (the Italians had an empire in East Africa and Libya, but being relative latecomers on the colonial scene they didn’t manage to spread their language much). Thus we don’t have large swaths of Catalan speakers in Latin America or Occitan ones in Quebec. But who knows what the future holds – and these languages may yet come into their own.