Spanish and the Other Roman Languanges

Spanish And The Other Roman Languanges

The family of ‘Roman languages’ is the group of existing languages which have developed from the Latin that the Romans spread all over the Mediterranean region and parts of Northern Europe. The Roman languages are Spanish, Italian, Rumanean, Portuguese and French. The parent languange, Latin, managed to grow into a fairly homogenous entity in spite of influence from other languages, especially Greek. For more than a thousand years it went from strength to strength as the official language of the Roman Empire in the ‘known’ world comprising the whole Mediterranean area including North Africa and the Middle East, France, a bit of Germany and most of Great Britain. At around 100 AD Rumania was also encorporated into the Roman Empire. The golden age of the Roman Empire lasted some 200 years from year 1 AD. Latin was the most used written language in this area and it is assumed that at least in Italy the language was spoken by the whole population, although it obviously developed and changed a lot during the centuries. Another assumption is that the populations of Northern Africa, the Middle East, Germania, the Slavic countries and Great Britain did not start speaking latin – in these areas the language was only used by the ‘elite’ – which explains that they changed to other languages soon after the collapse of the Roman Empire shortly after 400 AD. In Greece people carried on speaking the same Greek that they had been using for a long time before the arrival of the Romans. On the other hand, the populations of France, Spain, Portugal and Rumania had changed to a kind of Latin – which they have conserved until today in the form of their present Roman languages. This is partly due to the fact that many Italians emigrated to these areas. In the golden age of the Roman Empire, Italy was a wealthy but also overpopulated country. The Roman legionaires typically served for 16 years from they were 18 to 34 – and were then given a plot of land and a bag of money to make a life for themselves. As the centuries passed, land became unavailable in Italy, so the majority of the legionaires were allotted land and established their families mainly in France and Spain. Another explanation of the success of Latin could be that the Roman culture and social structure were so superior that the celtic populace realised that Latin was the language of the future – a language you had to learn if you wanted to be part of progress. Today Italian is the language which is closest to Latin, and French is the furthest away as far as pronunciation is concerned. As opposed to the other Romanian languages, Spanish was influenced by Arabic for centuries. You can hear this for example in the ‘guttural h’ – sound of ‘j’ and occassionally of ‘g’, and in a great number of words and expressions, and in the article ‘el’ and the contraction ‘al’. Nowadays, some 400 million people all over the world speak Spanish, turning it into the most extensive of the Roman languages.