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French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that specifically is classified under the Gallo-Romance languages.. The discussion of the history of a language is typically divided into "external history", describing the ethnic, political, social, technological, and other changes that affected the languages, and "internal history", describing the ...
Most other Romance languages are significantly more conservative phonetically, with Spanish, Italian, and especially Sardinian showing the most conservatism, and Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and Occitan showing moderate conservatism. [1] French also shows enormous phonetic changes between the Old French period and the modern language ...
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
From Latin to modern French. Manchester University Press. Sampson, Rodney (2010). Vowel Prosthesis in Romance: A Diachronic Study. Oxford University Press. Zampaulo, André (2019). Palatal sound change in the Romance languages: Diachronic and synchronic perspectives. Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics. Vol. 38.
Of Europeans who speak other languages natively, approximately one-fifth are able to speak French as a second language. [23] Many institutions of the EU use French as a working language along with English, German and Italian; in some institutions, French is the sole working language (e.g. at the Court of Justice of the European Union). [24]
Languages in this group are said to be more conservative, i.e. they retained more features of the original Latin. The West group split into a Gallo-Romance group, which became the Oïl languages (including French), Gallo-Italian, Occitan, Franco-Provençal and Romansh, and an Iberian Romance group which became Spanish and Portuguese.
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
Old French (franceis, françois, romanz; French: ancien français) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th [2] and mid-14th centuries. Rather than a unified language , Old French was a group of Romance dialects , mutually intelligible yet diverse .