A Study on Mutual Intelligibility between Romance Languages

Abstract

Romance languages are the modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin languages between the third and eighth centuries. This comes under a subgroup of Italic languages within the Indo-European language family. The five major and mostly spoken Romance languages all over the world are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. The fundamental vocabularies of all the Romance languages were inherited from Latin. Besides, some words shared in Romance languages are not directly from the Latin inheritance, but they are words that were borrowed from the Celtic origin. The main intention of this research is to discover the similarities between the Romance languages not only in the morphological, syntactic, semantic, and phonetic basis but also the vocabulary variations in this language family. By the beginning of the 21st century, 920 million people claimed a Romance language as their mother tongue whilst 300 million people as a second language. In the current global context, at least one language of the Romance language family is studied by a significant number of divergent ethnic groups in different parts of the world. In such a period, where Romance languages are embraced by thousands, the study of linguistic characteristics in terms of mutual intelligibility of Romance languages provides the opportunity to identify the unique features interconnected with each language. Romance methods of forming unfamiliar words are also inherited from Latin origin. For instance, the suffix "-āre” in Latin morphology, which is a part of infinitives, has made the influence for languages such as French, Italian, and Catalan in making verbs. For example, the lexical form of “to plant” in Latin is “plantāre” and similarly “planter” in French, “plantare" in Italian, and “plantar” in Catalan. In conclusion, the Romance languages, which were originated from Latin, have more intelligibility even if they are considered as different languages of different regions at present.