Western Romance languages
| Western Romance | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
France, Iberia, Northern Italy, and Switzerland |
| Linguistic classification: |
Indo-European
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| Subdivisions: | |
| Glottolog: | west2813 |
Classification of Romance languages
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Western Romance languages are one of the two subdivisions of a proposed subdivision of the Romance languages based on the La Spezia–Rimini line. They include the Gallo-Romance and Iberian-Romance branches as well as northern Italian. The subdivision is based solely on the use of the "s" for pluralization and the weakening of some consonants, but that makes the categorization highly problematic because there is much higher lexical similarity between all dialects of Italian and French than between French and Spanish. There is also much higher morphological similarity between Spanish and Italian dialects than between Italian and French.
Based on mutual intelligibility, Dalby counts a dozen languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Asturian-Leonese, Aragonese, Catalan, Gascon, Provençal, Gallo-Wallon, French, Franco-Provençal, Romansh, and Ladin. This classification criterion is however problematic, due to the much higher levels of mutual intelligibility between Italic and Iberian languages than between either of these with Gallo-Romance languages.
Some classifications include Italo-Dalmatian; the resulting clade is generally called Italo-Western Romance. Other classifications place Italo-Dalmatian with Eastern Romance.
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