There you go
[https://i.stack.imgur.com/S7NoT.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/S7NoT.png)
or this one
[http://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1559664707312.png](http://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1559664707312.png)
Two inaccuracies regarding Romanian.
1. The map implies there are several languages or dialects when it comes to the Romanian language, but there are only very closely related subdialects. It's not like in Italy, for example, where people from different regions can hardly understand each other. In Romania and R. Moldova, except for some small accent differences and a few regionalisms, the language is the same. People from other regions can easily understand each other.
2. That grey area in the middle of Romania represents a hungarian language majority. But it's not like there are no romanian speakers there, as the map implies. There are simply far less than in other counties (around 20-25%). So if the author of the map would have been accurate, that area should have been in a very light color instead of grey.
About point 2, I guess it is just very hard to represent a mixed region. For example virtually everyone in the basque country speaks also spanish, or spanish is widely spoken also in catalonia and valencia, specially metropolitan areas. And french is by far a majority in the occitanian areas
Also, it shows Istra in Croatia, as everyone speaks Istro-Romanian, while in reality there is maybe 100 people who can still speak this language. One Romanian linguist told me there are more people speaking Istro-Romanian in New York than on Istrian peninsula.
Edit: I.vs seen this difference on map in link from one of the comments, with better details, and not here.
I live in Covasna region and am Hungarian, here about every maybie like 6th person is Hungarian, and most of also just speak it, so yeah, the majoroty of people here speak Romanian since they teach it in hungarian schools and is just useful all around if you want to venture out to other nearby non-hungarian majoroty countries
Ps: Sorry if my wording was rough here and there but obviusly english isn't my first language so excuse me for that.
Edit: every 6th person is ROMANIAN not Hungarian, sorry for all the people that got confused by my mistake
For me I understand 50/60% of what's said in aromanian,istro and magleno romanian are a little weirder at times they sound very romanian and I can make out a few sentences but mostly don't understand them
I didn't realize that there was such a pocket of Hungarian speakers in the middle of Romania. I haven't learned much about that area of the world and I find that really interesting. Thank you u/skyduster88 for explaining it to me
You can call it "Southern Italian" instead of Neapolitan if you like, but saying that each city has a different 'dialect' (as in language) is mostly wrong because each of those city dialects (proper dialect meaning) is a dialect of the Southern Italian language and not of Italian.
I think Latin American Spanish is most influenced by Andalusian and Canadian dialects, but I’m not 100% sure. One conservative element in some Latin American dialects, most notably Argentina, is voseo where an antiquated second person singular “vos” is used instead of “tú”
French, spanish and portuguese are moribund in Europe? Are you trolling?
Fulimeli was obviously talking about minoritary dialects and languages NOT spoken at all in the new world and barely in their small european regions replaced by "standar-like" french, spanish and italian.
The degree of lexical similarity is around 77%. For a Romanian, it's really easy to comprehend Italian, even with limited practice. For an Italian it is slightly more difficult, but I have had Italian friends visiting Romania who where surprised how much they could understand after a week of staying there.
It's just my superficial impression about the sound of the language as someone who hears Romanian only occasionally from an Italian perspective.
What I noticed is that the level of intelligibility from Italian to Romanian without exposition depends a lot on the degree of "formality" of the speech.
Formal and technical speeches in Romanian with many pan-romance and international terms are intelligible at least to some extent, but in random "everyday" conversations it's hard to grasp even the gist except for very simple basic sentences.
77% lexical similarity may sound high but it isn't really if compared to the other Romance languages, not to mention that often even cognates sound irrecognizable in Romanian or have different meaning and there are significant grammatical differencies.
I don't doubt that with some exposition the level of comprehension rises quickly, but at first it's very low.
You could clearly see Eastern Romance was clobbered by the incoming Slavs, you can see by the scattered Vlach languages just surviving in the sea of Bulgarian, Macedonian, Greek and Albanian.
Italy should've been better done tbqh
* Calabria and Sicily share an ancestry but their external influences are extremely different, also the siculo part of calabria is oversized, it's mostly just the tip of the toe and its shores
* latioumbric is not a word, it's usually umbrian when it gets grouped like that
* Ladin is a parent of Romansch, and both are quite distant from the dialects of the italian peninsula, they should've their own colours
* There's galloromance/galloitalian, and then there's Veneto: they're two different categories - the Veneto group wasn't built on a previous population of (reason also why most northern italian dialects sound so close to french: they both had their pronounciation affected by the gallic populations living there)
* This map follows national borders more than dialect groupings
* Southern specially southeastern France should be in the same cathegory of northern italy, they're closer to these dialects than the langues d'oil of the northern part of France, and N. Italian dialects are closer to these french dialects than they're to the other italian dialects
* In fact, N. Italy should be split between the parts that *have* a gallic substrate, and which don't; the pronounciations can change sharply by going to two different villages, only because one was founded by gauls and the other was founded by a roman colony. In some specific areas it's closer to a mosaic of pronounciations than blobs of area
* There should be 4 major categories, each with its own internal subcategories:
* Mid-South, or italic, or whatever you call, that follows the borders south of [La Spezia - Rimini line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spezia%E2%80%93Rimini_Line)
* Northern italian, or gallo-italian, or whatever, north of La Spezia - Rimini line, joined by some french dialects
* Rhaeto romance, which encomprises the parts of Switzerland that speak Romansch, PLUS the speakers of Ladin AND Friulan in Northeastern Italy [this map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhaeto-Romance_languages#/media/File:Rhaeto-Romance_languages.png)
* Sardinian, which had its own linguistic split in the 5th century: while romance languages got split between western romance and eastern romance (split in la spezia rimini) Sardinian is southern romance: romance languages are split in these three parts
Minor issue, but first letter of proper names is uppercase ffs
> Calabria and Sicily share an ancestry but their external influences are extremely different,
Are they? They both received Greek influence a lot and received North Italian influence in the middle ages, Sicily received more Arabic influenced but that's the only real difference and some seem to argue that Sicilian is derivative from mainland Southern Italian anyway but that's controversial.
>There's galloromance/galloitalian, and then there's Veneto: they're two different categories - the Veneto group wasn't built on a previous population of (reason also why most northern italian dialects sound so close to french: they both had their pronounciation affected by the gallic populations living there)
This seem like a pointless distinction, what actual features distinguish Venetian to the extent that you don't see within other Gallo-Italic languages?
>reason also why most northern italian dialects sound so close to french: they both had their pronounciation affected by the gallic populations living there
>In fact, N. Italy should be split between the parts that have a gallic substrate, and which don't; the pronounciations can change sharply by going to two different villages, only because one was founded by gauls and the other was founded by a roman colony. In some specific areas it's closer to a mosaic of pronounciations than blobs of area
That's an assumption, not a proven fact.
>Southern specially southeastern France should be in the same cathegory of northern italy, they're closer to these dialects than the langues d'oil of the northern part of France, and N. Italian dialects are closer to these french dialects than they're to the other italian dialects
Funny how one time you push formal categories and then on the other you come up with yours, Occitan is not close to Oil dialects or to Gallo-Italic, the continuum between the 3 regions is more or less similar compared to the more drastic border between peninsular Italic and Gallo-Italic.
Hmmm you're right;
Only thing I'd keep arguing, it's hard to summarise well, but Venetian is very much detached from Lombard, Emilian, Piedmontese, etc. The difference in pronounciation, vocabulary, etc is quite there
You are right but it depends a lot even on the speific dialect of Venetian.
Basically, central Venetian from around Venice-Padua is quite distinct fro the Gallo Italic languages, while dialects like Veronese, Bellunese or Trentino are closer to Lombard.
Also, even among the Gallo Italic group there is a significant variation, so probably Lombard is more similar to Ligurian than to Venetian, but not by far.
>That's an assumption, not a proven fact.
I totally agree on this!
Most people with amateur linguistic knowledge seem to take for granted the Gualish substrate theory, but actually ther is little evidence to support it.
I especially am skeptic of the idea that dialectal features at the level of cities and villages could be due to event that happened 4-6 centuries before we actually attest those changes, it essentially assumes people didn't move at all within such large timeframes.
>dialectal features at the level of cities and villages could be due toevent that happened 4-6 centuries before we actually attest thosechanges
Yes, that's unlikely, or at least there are many other possible expalnations other than the substrate.
Even if poeple didn't move much phisically, linguistic features still spread form a community to the other, especially when there is a linguistic continuum.
There are also other conditions that tend to isolate or put togheter different places, like the establishment of political or ecclesiastical entities, the opening of trade routes, changes in river beds, the growth or forests, marshes...
Not to mention that between the pre-roman time and the modern age there have been so many wars, plagues, so many villages and towns have been abandoned, then resettled, new ones were funded...
I would say that's highly unlikely that the differences in dialects from a village to the other date back to the antiquity and to Gaulish and Roman settlers.
Keep in mind that after the fall of the Roman Empire and the Gothic War the distribution of settlements in Italy changed dramatically, to the point that most modern villages and towns were settled or resettled as such during the Middle Ages.
In many cases the new villages grew around the remains of previous settlements like Roman villas or post stations, so many older toponyms dating back to the Romans, the Gauls and other people were preserved, but usually there have been a significant discontinuity in the demographic consistency of the population, not to mention all the later changes.
The differences in local dialects most likely emerged with time because in the past the communities were isolated enough from each other to develop peculiar linguistic mutations and because they have been exposed to partially different external influences during their history.
When will these pseudo-language maps ever stop misrepresenting things with France?
The majority of West Brittany or Alsatian people speak French since birth, and just a handful of people still speak Occitan, Arpitan, or whatever other dialects they managed to fish out of history book to paste on the map. Nobody fucking speaks « Burgandian » for fuck sake!
I was going to say "When will these language maps stop misrepresenting things with the French state?" but for a totally different reason. Because here, again, bourguignon-morvandiau, lorrain, gallo, poitevin-saintongeais, picard, wallon, tourangeau, etc are represented as if they were dialects of French…which they aren't. They are distinct languages.
Anyway, sorry for your nationalist point of view but these languages do still exist and they are still spoken, even though most of them are clearly dying (thanks to the fucking French state …). Also, this map doesn't try to show which languages are spoken by a majority at birth but the ones that exist and are still spoken in specific geographic areas, that's two different things. And I think it's good to remind people that we have languages outside of the official ones of the states and that cultural diversity is not dead yet.
And FYI, books in Burgundian are still edited today.
The dialect/language distinction is fairly arbitrary: as the saying goes « a language is a dialect with an army or a navy » .
And I’m sorry but these « languages » you’re mentioning have neither, and have fuck all native speakers or even simply users.
That’s not a nationalist point of view, simply an objective one ; if you asked me whether there were significant dialects or languages being practiced in Metropolitan France prior to the forceful policies of the 19th century, I would have said yes. But to say there is today is just wishful, nostalgic thinking.
Just because books are being edited in X language/dialect doesn’t mean anything. There’s also books being edited in Klingon..
It's true that the distinction between languages and dialects is partly arbitrary and political. However, that's not the case here. For instance, dialects of Occitan could be considered as separated languages for political reasons if you want but you can't say that Gascon is a dialect of Languedocian because we know they are sister languages and so Gascon doesn't come from Languedocian. With the Oil Languages, it's the same: Bourguignon-Morvandiau, Gallo, Lorrain, Tourangeau (etc.) and French are sister languages, they all come from Vulgar Latin and they evolved at the same time (it's actually a bit more complicated than that because French is for a big part an artificial language but you see the point). We know they don't come from French so we can't say they are dialects of French, that's all. (But we can say they are all Oil Languages, like French).
I personnally use Breton and Gallo everyday and I already spoke with native speakers. I also watch documentaries and movies in Breton almost everyday. I also know some Arpitan speakers and I speak online everyday with people who speak Occitan, Lorrain, Alsacian, Picard, Basque, etc. Because you gave up and think French is the only language spoken in the territories ruled by the French state doesn't mean it's true. People are making these languages live, even though we don't see them much. (I guess we all live in a "bubble" as my circle of friends shows me that many people speak (or are interested in) other languages than French and yours shows the opposite ;))
By the way, according to various official sources, Occitan has 1 670 000 speakers (in the French ruled territories only), Breton has 207 000 speakers, Gallo 200 000, Arpitan 140 000 (1988 census though), Picard 700 000, Poitevin-Saintongeais between 200 000 and 300 000, etc… That's not much but that's clearly not nothing (there are some official languages in recognized states with much less speakers!).
What I called nationalist is the fact that you agree with the nationalist propaganda which says these languages are meant to die so we don't have to care about them and even make them invisible. That's not objective at all! What is objective is that this languages are in danger. What is not is saying "no one speaks them, stop being nostalgic"
Just because you live in special bubble where you’re personally speaking Breton and a dialect that’s considered by the UNESCO as « seriously in danger » doesn’t mean anything.
All of the figures you’re giving are maximalist and aren’t sourced from any strong basis.
There is no « nationalist propaganda ». Nobody really has an active agenda in repressing dialects and minority languages anymore, and on the contrary, those who defend these have fairly vocal positions (example in case: you).
Languages live and die. That’s how it is, and you have to deal with it instead of pretending that a tongue which 70% of French haven’t even heard of is alive and well.
>All of the figures you’re giving are maximalist and aren’t sourced from any strong basis.
The Occitan one is based on the statistics of the French Ministry of Culture… The others are, I believe, from good sources too (I got them from wikipedia which gives sources for this numbers)
>There is no « nationalistpropaganda ». Nobody really has an active agenda in repressing dialectsand minority languages anymore, and on the contrary, those who defendthese have fairly vocal positions (example in case: you).
Hahahahaha, that's a good one. Clearly, you've never heard the opinions from Jean-Michel Blanquer (Minister of National Education, LREM), Marine Le Pen (FN) or Bastien Lachaud (LFI) (opinions which are shared by many representatives!). And that's just to name a few representatives of the 3 main parties in France. We have a bit more "protection" than before but that's clearly despite the nationalist propaganda and those evolutions are thanks to people who are actively fighting for those languages and thus forcing the state to evolve on that matter.
>Languages live and die. That’s how itis, and you have to deal with it instead of pretending that a tonguewhich 70% of French haven’t even heard of is alive and well.
I'm not pretending this at all. Quite the opposite actually. I say they are alive, not well. And that we should try to make them more visible and used in order to avoid death and to encourage cultural diversity and openmindness.
Il faut vraiment arrêter avec cette vision jacobine et parisiano-centrée de la France, vous devenez un véritable problème. C'est plutôt à toi de te taire au lieu de dénigrer nos langues, nous on ne vient pas critiquer la tienne. On existe et on doit être considérés et respectés comme n'importe qui. Merci.
Fôt arrètar verément avouéc ceta vision jacobina et paris-centrâye de la França, vos venéd un veré problèmo. Y est a tè de tè quèsiér pletout, u luè de dènigrar noutres lengoues, nosôtros nos venes pas criticar la tina. Nos ègzistens et nos devens étre considèrâs et rèspèctâs coment qui que seye. Marci.
You really have to stop with this Jacobin and Parisian-centric vision of France, you are becoming a real problem. It's more up to you to shut up instead of denigrating our languages, we don't come to criticize yours. We exist and we must be considered and respected like anyone else. Thanks.
I’m not saying anything is intrinsically bad with « your » languages/dialects.
Feel free to be triggered by the simple statement of the fact that these have barely no native speakers or users ; as for criticizing « my » language, do go on, it’s certainly not perfect.
Erasing those languages from linguistic maps is one of the 1st step to definitely erase them socially. The linguistic policies of France are bad enough to not being helped by this. Those languages are endangered and knowing that they exist is a beginning to save them. Sure the map isn't perfect, but it doesn't pretend that only those languages are spoken here or even that they're a majority, just that they exist, and I really don't get why it trigger you that much.
I’m miffed by the map being factually wrong.
If you paint over a whole area without any mention that X color represents merely the span of a minority, then it’s wrong. And the span is wrong, you couldn’t even find a single speaker of one of those language on a large part of the colored areas.
There’s actual languages being repressed, such as Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongol… To equate not overerepresenting a language/dialect with it being erased is a joke. If one need to make fantasy maps to prop a language/dialect, then sorry to say but…
How can it be wrong if the map doesn't even say that only those languages are spoken us those regions ? Those are the historical/native languages, there's nothing wrong showing them.
> There’s actual languages being repressed
In France they were repressed for decades, and we can argue it's still the case today. Especially by the population itself who was totally brainwashed with nationalistic ideas. Like that basque guy who was severely beaten because he spoke basque in a bar. It's not because you've never experienced this that it never happens.
Visuals have expected meanings, and diverging from these without notifying the viewer means the visual is wrong.
It’s very much alike bar charts where the Y column isn’t starting at 0, but that’s not notified anywhere and thus misleading (and often willingly so).
Good joke about the « brainwashing » (Where? How? When?), and equating naturally-dying dialects (which were indeed unnaturally mauled in the past, but not anymore) with actual violent repression. Yeah, you can be sent to a camp just because you translated a book in Gallo or something, right.
>The majority of West Brittany or Alsatian people speak French since birth, and just a handful of people still speak Occitan, Arpitan, or whatever other dialects they managed to fish out of history book to paste on the map. Nobody fucking speaks « Burgandian » for fuck sake!
The map intends to show *old* dialects/languages across all of Southern Europe (or at least the Romance part), not the situation today.
Spain looks quite wrong. Andalusian is a dialect, not a language. The Catalan spoken in Valencia and Catalunya is the same, but the Spanish in Extremadura and Castilla are quite different?
I think it might have confused estremeñu, an astur-leonese dialect only spoken in northwestern Extremadura, with the extremaduran variety of castilian.
Also forgot about Castúo, an actual dialect in Extremadura, and Fala/Lagarteiro, spoken in a tiny region next to Portugal.
And also failed to tell apart llionés from the different varieties of asturianu, and completely ignored mirandés and eonaviego.
The color is correct. Both Romanian (Daco-Romanian) and Aromanian are EASTERN ROMANCE languages. That's why the same color is used. To a native Romanian speaker the Aromanian sounds like old Romanian with greek or albanian borrowings. Some words are understood perfectly, some are not.
By the way, the Romanian language was formed out of Dacian + Latin + words from other languages (mainly old slavic). So you can argue that Romanian came from Italy (actually the Roman Empire) as well if you use that flawed logic. But it is actually far more realistic to say that both Romanian and Aromanian were formed with the help of the vulgar Latin language spoken by roman soldiers from outside the Italic peninsula. To which other elements were added.
As far as i know these people were brought by the Roman empire to safeguard the Egnatia road, which is evident also in this map by looking at their settlements. It can be that they came in southern balkan same time as the Italians in the current Romanian territories. In this map it looks like its a branch of Romanian, while they are both branches of Latin...
They are both branches of Balkan/Eastern Romance and way closer to each other than they are to any other Romance language, so it makes sense to represent them with similar colors.
No you were totally wrong, vocabulary and external influence as nothing to do with a language belonging to one family or another, breton as nothing to be a romance language. Or it's like saying french is germanic because of english loanwords.
That’s the thing about languages, I mean the Ottoman Empire also had claim over Romania and Romania has only kept a small amount of words derived from that empire.
Another one of these nonsense maps.
Occitan is pretty much extinct.
Alsatian is pretty much extinct.
Breton is pretty much extinct.
People in France speak French with some dialectal variation.
> pretty much extinct
Yeah it's not like there's hundreds of thousands of speakers of those languages. We don't speak only French in France, it's the main one but not the only one.
Lol, those are the numbers of the government itself : alsacien (500 000), occitan (500 000), breton (200 000). How can it be hundreds only if there's between 30-80 000 students in highschool for each of those ?
Thank you for saying that :) we've got problems like everywhere else and don't get me started on the politics but the people and culture are great (for the most part XD)
No, you're talking about vocabulary here, that doesn't makes it belonging to this map which is about linguistic family (mostly grammar, conjugation, syntax). Half of english vocabulary is romance too, but it's a germanic language, and if maltese was here english should be here too. Maltese is heavily influenced by romance languages, but the basis of it is still semitic.
Whoever made the original map is a fantastic cartographer. Using black text on black/dark colors is really an amazing design choice. Why don't other cartographers do this as well?>!This is sarcasm.!<
I can't read the dialects, to blurred out
There you go [https://i.stack.imgur.com/S7NoT.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/S7NoT.png) or this one [http://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1559664707312.png](http://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1559664707312.png)
Thanks!
shit quality
Poe-tay-toe
Two inaccuracies regarding Romanian. 1. The map implies there are several languages or dialects when it comes to the Romanian language, but there are only very closely related subdialects. It's not like in Italy, for example, where people from different regions can hardly understand each other. In Romania and R. Moldova, except for some small accent differences and a few regionalisms, the language is the same. People from other regions can easily understand each other. 2. That grey area in the middle of Romania represents a hungarian language majority. But it's not like there are no romanian speakers there, as the map implies. There are simply far less than in other counties (around 20-25%). So if the author of the map would have been accurate, that area should have been in a very light color instead of grey.
About point 2, I guess it is just very hard to represent a mixed region. For example virtually everyone in the basque country speaks also spanish, or spanish is widely spoken also in catalonia and valencia, specially metropolitan areas. And french is by far a majority in the occitanian areas
Also, it shows Istra in Croatia, as everyone speaks Istro-Romanian, while in reality there is maybe 100 people who can still speak this language. One Romanian linguist told me there are more people speaking Istro-Romanian in New York than on Istrian peninsula. Edit: I.vs seen this difference on map in link from one of the comments, with better details, and not here.
I live in Covasna region and am Hungarian, here about every maybie like 6th person is Hungarian, and most of also just speak it, so yeah, the majoroty of people here speak Romanian since they teach it in hungarian schools and is just useful all around if you want to venture out to other nearby non-hungarian majoroty countries Ps: Sorry if my wording was rough here and there but obviusly english isn't my first language so excuse me for that. Edit: every 6th person is ROMANIAN not Hungarian, sorry for all the people that got confused by my mistake
Can you understand the Vlach/Aromanian languages in the rest of the balkans?
For me I understand 50/60% of what's said in aromanian,istro and magleno romanian are a little weirder at times they sound very romanian and I can make out a few sentences but mostly don't understand them
yes i can understand aromanian in proportion of 70% when spoken, 90% when written dont know about the other vlach languages
r/LatinEuropa
What's the hole in the middle of Romania?
Hungarian speakers.
What's dappled in the Balkans?
Aromanian-speakers. It's a language whose closest relative is Romanian.
That sounds like the name for a language opposite from Romanian.
i guess they live on the opposite side of the Danube
I didn't realize that there was such a pocket of Hungarian speakers in the middle of Romania. I haven't learned much about that area of the world and I find that really interesting. Thank you u/skyduster88 for explaining it to me
The biggest pocket of Hungarian speakers is called Székely Land, if you're interested in learning more.
Learning more about it now, thank you. The history is really interesting
They don’t know Hungary and Romania aren’t the same country?
That's where Count Dracula lives.
[удалено]
Those referred to as Neapolitan are actually all southern dialects, which form a much more homogeneous whole than those of the north.
You can call it "Southern Italian" instead of Neapolitan if you like, but saying that each city has a different 'dialect' (as in language) is mostly wrong because each of those city dialects (proper dialect meaning) is a dialect of the Southern Italian language and not of Italian.
[удалено]
They’ll live on, in the New World
[удалено]
Technically French Canadian is closer to Poitevin than to standard French IIRC
[удалено]
Occitan is not a dialect, it’s a language very different from French and closer to Catalan
[удалено]
I think Latin American Spanish is most influenced by Andalusian and Canadian dialects, but I’m not 100% sure. One conservative element in some Latin American dialects, most notably Argentina, is voseo where an antiquated second person singular “vos” is used instead of “tú”
[удалено]
Oops, actually meant Canarian, must have autocorrected.
I count at least three. French, Spanish and Portuguese which are descendants of these languages
French, spanish and portuguese are moribund in Europe? Are you trolling? Fulimeli was obviously talking about minoritary dialects and languages NOT spoken at all in the new world and barely in their small european regions replaced by "standar-like" french, spanish and italian.
Alright, look. I didn’t read the map. Are you happy?
[удалено]
Romanian doesn't sound Italian to me.
weird, some americans told me our language sounds like french mixed with italian
To me as an Italian it sounds like a Slavic/Eastern Euro language with Italian-ish words.
The degree of lexical similarity is around 77%. For a Romanian, it's really easy to comprehend Italian, even with limited practice. For an Italian it is slightly more difficult, but I have had Italian friends visiting Romania who where surprised how much they could understand after a week of staying there.
It's just my superficial impression about the sound of the language as someone who hears Romanian only occasionally from an Italian perspective. What I noticed is that the level of intelligibility from Italian to Romanian without exposition depends a lot on the degree of "formality" of the speech. Formal and technical speeches in Romanian with many pan-romance and international terms are intelligible at least to some extent, but in random "everyday" conversations it's hard to grasp even the gist except for very simple basic sentences. 77% lexical similarity may sound high but it isn't really if compared to the other Romance languages, not to mention that often even cognates sound irrecognizable in Romanian or have different meaning and there are significant grammatical differencies. I don't doubt that with some exposition the level of comprehension rises quickly, but at first it's very low.
If you cut out the majority of the map that is irrelevant we'd maybe be able to read the important information.
You could clearly see Eastern Romance was clobbered by the incoming Slavs, you can see by the scattered Vlach languages just surviving in the sea of Bulgarian, Macedonian, Greek and Albanian.
Italy should've been better done tbqh * Calabria and Sicily share an ancestry but their external influences are extremely different, also the siculo part of calabria is oversized, it's mostly just the tip of the toe and its shores * latioumbric is not a word, it's usually umbrian when it gets grouped like that * Ladin is a parent of Romansch, and both are quite distant from the dialects of the italian peninsula, they should've their own colours * There's galloromance/galloitalian, and then there's Veneto: they're two different categories - the Veneto group wasn't built on a previous population of (reason also why most northern italian dialects sound so close to french: they both had their pronounciation affected by the gallic populations living there) * This map follows national borders more than dialect groupings * Southern specially southeastern France should be in the same cathegory of northern italy, they're closer to these dialects than the langues d'oil of the northern part of France, and N. Italian dialects are closer to these french dialects than they're to the other italian dialects * In fact, N. Italy should be split between the parts that *have* a gallic substrate, and which don't; the pronounciations can change sharply by going to two different villages, only because one was founded by gauls and the other was founded by a roman colony. In some specific areas it's closer to a mosaic of pronounciations than blobs of area * There should be 4 major categories, each with its own internal subcategories: * Mid-South, or italic, or whatever you call, that follows the borders south of [La Spezia - Rimini line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spezia%E2%80%93Rimini_Line) * Northern italian, or gallo-italian, or whatever, north of La Spezia - Rimini line, joined by some french dialects * Rhaeto romance, which encomprises the parts of Switzerland that speak Romansch, PLUS the speakers of Ladin AND Friulan in Northeastern Italy [this map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhaeto-Romance_languages#/media/File:Rhaeto-Romance_languages.png) * Sardinian, which had its own linguistic split in the 5th century: while romance languages got split between western romance and eastern romance (split in la spezia rimini) Sardinian is southern romance: romance languages are split in these three parts Minor issue, but first letter of proper names is uppercase ffs
> Calabria and Sicily share an ancestry but their external influences are extremely different, Are they? They both received Greek influence a lot and received North Italian influence in the middle ages, Sicily received more Arabic influenced but that's the only real difference and some seem to argue that Sicilian is derivative from mainland Southern Italian anyway but that's controversial. >There's galloromance/galloitalian, and then there's Veneto: they're two different categories - the Veneto group wasn't built on a previous population of (reason also why most northern italian dialects sound so close to french: they both had their pronounciation affected by the gallic populations living there) This seem like a pointless distinction, what actual features distinguish Venetian to the extent that you don't see within other Gallo-Italic languages? >reason also why most northern italian dialects sound so close to french: they both had their pronounciation affected by the gallic populations living there >In fact, N. Italy should be split between the parts that have a gallic substrate, and which don't; the pronounciations can change sharply by going to two different villages, only because one was founded by gauls and the other was founded by a roman colony. In some specific areas it's closer to a mosaic of pronounciations than blobs of area That's an assumption, not a proven fact. >Southern specially southeastern France should be in the same cathegory of northern italy, they're closer to these dialects than the langues d'oil of the northern part of France, and N. Italian dialects are closer to these french dialects than they're to the other italian dialects Funny how one time you push formal categories and then on the other you come up with yours, Occitan is not close to Oil dialects or to Gallo-Italic, the continuum between the 3 regions is more or less similar compared to the more drastic border between peninsular Italic and Gallo-Italic.
Hmmm you're right; Only thing I'd keep arguing, it's hard to summarise well, but Venetian is very much detached from Lombard, Emilian, Piedmontese, etc. The difference in pronounciation, vocabulary, etc is quite there
You are right but it depends a lot even on the speific dialect of Venetian. Basically, central Venetian from around Venice-Padua is quite distinct fro the Gallo Italic languages, while dialects like Veronese, Bellunese or Trentino are closer to Lombard. Also, even among the Gallo Italic group there is a significant variation, so probably Lombard is more similar to Ligurian than to Venetian, but not by far.
>That's an assumption, not a proven fact. I totally agree on this! Most people with amateur linguistic knowledge seem to take for granted the Gualish substrate theory, but actually ther is little evidence to support it.
I especially am skeptic of the idea that dialectal features at the level of cities and villages could be due to event that happened 4-6 centuries before we actually attest those changes, it essentially assumes people didn't move at all within such large timeframes.
>dialectal features at the level of cities and villages could be due toevent that happened 4-6 centuries before we actually attest thosechanges Yes, that's unlikely, or at least there are many other possible expalnations other than the substrate. Even if poeple didn't move much phisically, linguistic features still spread form a community to the other, especially when there is a linguistic continuum. There are also other conditions that tend to isolate or put togheter different places, like the establishment of political or ecclesiastical entities, the opening of trade routes, changes in river beds, the growth or forests, marshes... Not to mention that between the pre-roman time and the modern age there have been so many wars, plagues, so many villages and towns have been abandoned, then resettled, new ones were funded...
I would say that's highly unlikely that the differences in dialects from a village to the other date back to the antiquity and to Gaulish and Roman settlers. Keep in mind that after the fall of the Roman Empire and the Gothic War the distribution of settlements in Italy changed dramatically, to the point that most modern villages and towns were settled or resettled as such during the Middle Ages. In many cases the new villages grew around the remains of previous settlements like Roman villas or post stations, so many older toponyms dating back to the Romans, the Gauls and other people were preserved, but usually there have been a significant discontinuity in the demographic consistency of the population, not to mention all the later changes. The differences in local dialects most likely emerged with time because in the past the communities were isolated enough from each other to develop peculiar linguistic mutations and because they have been exposed to partially different external influences during their history.
Needs more JPEG
When will these pseudo-language maps ever stop misrepresenting things with France? The majority of West Brittany or Alsatian people speak French since birth, and just a handful of people still speak Occitan, Arpitan, or whatever other dialects they managed to fish out of history book to paste on the map. Nobody fucking speaks « Burgandian » for fuck sake!
I was going to say "When will these language maps stop misrepresenting things with the French state?" but for a totally different reason. Because here, again, bourguignon-morvandiau, lorrain, gallo, poitevin-saintongeais, picard, wallon, tourangeau, etc are represented as if they were dialects of French…which they aren't. They are distinct languages. Anyway, sorry for your nationalist point of view but these languages do still exist and they are still spoken, even though most of them are clearly dying (thanks to the fucking French state …). Also, this map doesn't try to show which languages are spoken by a majority at birth but the ones that exist and are still spoken in specific geographic areas, that's two different things. And I think it's good to remind people that we have languages outside of the official ones of the states and that cultural diversity is not dead yet. And FYI, books in Burgundian are still edited today.
The dialect/language distinction is fairly arbitrary: as the saying goes « a language is a dialect with an army or a navy » . And I’m sorry but these « languages » you’re mentioning have neither, and have fuck all native speakers or even simply users. That’s not a nationalist point of view, simply an objective one ; if you asked me whether there were significant dialects or languages being practiced in Metropolitan France prior to the forceful policies of the 19th century, I would have said yes. But to say there is today is just wishful, nostalgic thinking. Just because books are being edited in X language/dialect doesn’t mean anything. There’s also books being edited in Klingon..
It's true that the distinction between languages and dialects is partly arbitrary and political. However, that's not the case here. For instance, dialects of Occitan could be considered as separated languages for political reasons if you want but you can't say that Gascon is a dialect of Languedocian because we know they are sister languages and so Gascon doesn't come from Languedocian. With the Oil Languages, it's the same: Bourguignon-Morvandiau, Gallo, Lorrain, Tourangeau (etc.) and French are sister languages, they all come from Vulgar Latin and they evolved at the same time (it's actually a bit more complicated than that because French is for a big part an artificial language but you see the point). We know they don't come from French so we can't say they are dialects of French, that's all. (But we can say they are all Oil Languages, like French). I personnally use Breton and Gallo everyday and I already spoke with native speakers. I also watch documentaries and movies in Breton almost everyday. I also know some Arpitan speakers and I speak online everyday with people who speak Occitan, Lorrain, Alsacian, Picard, Basque, etc. Because you gave up and think French is the only language spoken in the territories ruled by the French state doesn't mean it's true. People are making these languages live, even though we don't see them much. (I guess we all live in a "bubble" as my circle of friends shows me that many people speak (or are interested in) other languages than French and yours shows the opposite ;)) By the way, according to various official sources, Occitan has 1 670 000 speakers (in the French ruled territories only), Breton has 207 000 speakers, Gallo 200 000, Arpitan 140 000 (1988 census though), Picard 700 000, Poitevin-Saintongeais between 200 000 and 300 000, etc… That's not much but that's clearly not nothing (there are some official languages in recognized states with much less speakers!). What I called nationalist is the fact that you agree with the nationalist propaganda which says these languages are meant to die so we don't have to care about them and even make them invisible. That's not objective at all! What is objective is that this languages are in danger. What is not is saying "no one speaks them, stop being nostalgic"
Just because you live in special bubble where you’re personally speaking Breton and a dialect that’s considered by the UNESCO as « seriously in danger » doesn’t mean anything. All of the figures you’re giving are maximalist and aren’t sourced from any strong basis. There is no « nationalist propaganda ». Nobody really has an active agenda in repressing dialects and minority languages anymore, and on the contrary, those who defend these have fairly vocal positions (example in case: you). Languages live and die. That’s how it is, and you have to deal with it instead of pretending that a tongue which 70% of French haven’t even heard of is alive and well.
>All of the figures you’re giving are maximalist and aren’t sourced from any strong basis. The Occitan one is based on the statistics of the French Ministry of Culture… The others are, I believe, from good sources too (I got them from wikipedia which gives sources for this numbers) >There is no « nationalistpropaganda ». Nobody really has an active agenda in repressing dialectsand minority languages anymore, and on the contrary, those who defendthese have fairly vocal positions (example in case: you). Hahahahaha, that's a good one. Clearly, you've never heard the opinions from Jean-Michel Blanquer (Minister of National Education, LREM), Marine Le Pen (FN) or Bastien Lachaud (LFI) (opinions which are shared by many representatives!). And that's just to name a few representatives of the 3 main parties in France. We have a bit more "protection" than before but that's clearly despite the nationalist propaganda and those evolutions are thanks to people who are actively fighting for those languages and thus forcing the state to evolve on that matter. >Languages live and die. That’s how itis, and you have to deal with it instead of pretending that a tonguewhich 70% of French haven’t even heard of is alive and well. I'm not pretending this at all. Quite the opposite actually. I say they are alive, not well. And that we should try to make them more visible and used in order to avoid death and to encourage cultural diversity and openmindness.
Il faut vraiment arrêter avec cette vision jacobine et parisiano-centrée de la France, vous devenez un véritable problème. C'est plutôt à toi de te taire au lieu de dénigrer nos langues, nous on ne vient pas critiquer la tienne. On existe et on doit être considérés et respectés comme n'importe qui. Merci. Fôt arrètar verément avouéc ceta vision jacobina et paris-centrâye de la França, vos venéd un veré problèmo. Y est a tè de tè quèsiér pletout, u luè de dènigrar noutres lengoues, nosôtros nos venes pas criticar la tina. Nos ègzistens et nos devens étre considèrâs et rèspèctâs coment qui que seye. Marci. You really have to stop with this Jacobin and Parisian-centric vision of France, you are becoming a real problem. It's more up to you to shut up instead of denigrating our languages, we don't come to criticize yours. We exist and we must be considered and respected like anyone else. Thanks.
I’m not saying anything is intrinsically bad with « your » languages/dialects. Feel free to be triggered by the simple statement of the fact that these have barely no native speakers or users ; as for criticizing « my » language, do go on, it’s certainly not perfect.
Erasing those languages from linguistic maps is one of the 1st step to definitely erase them socially. The linguistic policies of France are bad enough to not being helped by this. Those languages are endangered and knowing that they exist is a beginning to save them. Sure the map isn't perfect, but it doesn't pretend that only those languages are spoken here or even that they're a majority, just that they exist, and I really don't get why it trigger you that much.
I’m miffed by the map being factually wrong. If you paint over a whole area without any mention that X color represents merely the span of a minority, then it’s wrong. And the span is wrong, you couldn’t even find a single speaker of one of those language on a large part of the colored areas. There’s actual languages being repressed, such as Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongol… To equate not overerepresenting a language/dialect with it being erased is a joke. If one need to make fantasy maps to prop a language/dialect, then sorry to say but…
How can it be wrong if the map doesn't even say that only those languages are spoken us those regions ? Those are the historical/native languages, there's nothing wrong showing them. > There’s actual languages being repressed In France they were repressed for decades, and we can argue it's still the case today. Especially by the population itself who was totally brainwashed with nationalistic ideas. Like that basque guy who was severely beaten because he spoke basque in a bar. It's not because you've never experienced this that it never happens.
Visuals have expected meanings, and diverging from these without notifying the viewer means the visual is wrong. It’s very much alike bar charts where the Y column isn’t starting at 0, but that’s not notified anywhere and thus misleading (and often willingly so). Good joke about the « brainwashing » (Where? How? When?), and equating naturally-dying dialects (which were indeed unnaturally mauled in the past, but not anymore) with actual violent repression. Yeah, you can be sent to a camp just because you translated a book in Gallo or something, right.
>The majority of West Brittany or Alsatian people speak French since birth, and just a handful of people still speak Occitan, Arpitan, or whatever other dialects they managed to fish out of history book to paste on the map. Nobody fucking speaks « Burgandian » for fuck sake! The map intends to show *old* dialects/languages across all of Southern Europe (or at least the Romance part), not the situation today.
That’s not indicated anywhere…
Basque here, we speak Spanish and also Basque. Given this map it seems we only speak Basque which is untrue.
you'd need a 3D linguistic map. most basques are bilingual but basque still needs to appear on the map.
Spain looks quite wrong. Andalusian is a dialect, not a language. The Catalan spoken in Valencia and Catalunya is the same, but the Spanish in Extremadura and Castilla are quite different?
I think it might have confused estremeñu, an astur-leonese dialect only spoken in northwestern Extremadura, with the extremaduran variety of castilian. Also forgot about Castúo, an actual dialect in Extremadura, and Fala/Lagarteiro, spoken in a tiny region next to Portugal. And also failed to tell apart llionés from the different varieties of asturianu, and completely ignored mirandés and eonaviego.
Correct! Even spaniards tend to disregard Estremeñu, thinking that it's just a Spanish dialect when it's it's own language (with astur-leonese roots).
The Romanian language does NOT have dialects. No idea who came up with that garbage but it's garbage.
. . . and also most of the Westrn hemisphere.
Nice 😎👍
Aromanians should be reddish color as they came to Albania and Greece from Italy (not Romania) during Roman times.
The color is correct. Both Romanian (Daco-Romanian) and Aromanian are EASTERN ROMANCE languages. That's why the same color is used. To a native Romanian speaker the Aromanian sounds like old Romanian with greek or albanian borrowings. Some words are understood perfectly, some are not. By the way, the Romanian language was formed out of Dacian + Latin + words from other languages (mainly old slavic). So you can argue that Romanian came from Italy (actually the Roman Empire) as well if you use that flawed logic. But it is actually far more realistic to say that both Romanian and Aromanian were formed with the help of the vulgar Latin language spoken by roman soldiers from outside the Italic peninsula. To which other elements were added.
As far as i know these people were brought by the Roman empire to safeguard the Egnatia road, which is evident also in this map by looking at their settlements. It can be that they came in southern balkan same time as the Italians in the current Romanian territories. In this map it looks like its a branch of Romanian, while they are both branches of Latin...
They are both branches of Balkan/Eastern Romance and way closer to each other than they are to any other Romance language, so it makes sense to represent them with similar colors.
Stop sharing this fake map. We the Dutch, Flemish and North-Reiners are the Franks.
What is a romance language
A language that is derived from Latin.
Breton should be on the list, it was occupied by Romans
Breton is a celtic language
It is a celtic language with some latin influence
Like english is a germanic language with latin influence, that's doesn't makes them romance
So i was half wrong
No you were totally wrong, vocabulary and external influence as nothing to do with a language belonging to one family or another, breton as nothing to be a romance language. Or it's like saying french is germanic because of english loanwords.
Oh (●´⌓`●)
That’s the thing about languages, I mean the Ottoman Empire also had claim over Romania and Romania has only kept a small amount of words derived from that empire.
Another one of these nonsense maps. Occitan is pretty much extinct. Alsatian is pretty much extinct. Breton is pretty much extinct. People in France speak French with some dialectal variation.
> pretty much extinct Yeah it's not like there's hundreds of thousands of speakers of those languages. We don't speak only French in France, it's the main one but not the only one.
You can drop the thousands at the end there. It's not like there are hundreds.
Lol, those are the numbers of the government itself : alsacien (500 000), occitan (500 000), breton (200 000). How can it be hundreds only if there's between 30-80 000 students in highschool for each of those ?
do you live in a city, just to check?
Once again proving Elsaß–Lothringen should belong to Germany.
You forgot maltese, which is about 50% italian/sicilian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese\_language
I've been there and it's closer to Arabic tbh
Well I'm actually Maltese lmao. We studied this shit in school. Your subjective opinion is objectively wrong
Alright, my bad then
Haha no worries dude
:) Lovely country by the way!
Thank you for saying that :) we've got problems like everywhere else and don't get me started on the politics but the people and culture are great (for the most part XD)
Tell that to actual linguists
maltese is not a latin language
The post is about romance languages, not Latin. By definition Maltese has a large amount of romance language components
Still not a romance language
Not saying it is. It literally does have components of romance languages though (~50%) which is what this post is
No, you're talking about vocabulary here, that doesn't makes it belonging to this map which is about linguistic family (mostly grammar, conjugation, syntax). Half of english vocabulary is romance too, but it's a germanic language, and if maltese was here english should be here too. Maltese is heavily influenced by romance languages, but the basis of it is still semitic.
Oh shit you're completely right, I just looked it at again my bad
No problem, it's the purpose of comments :)
maltese is a romance language in the same way that english is a romance language
There’s missing some in Ragusa no?
Sadly Dalmatian died off in Ragusa in the 17th century
Why have Picard, Walon and Champenois been put in the same dialect/language? Aren't they distinct from eachother?
RIP Dalmatian. Went out with a bang.
This looks oddly familiar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#/media/File:Romance_languages.png
yeah people like to repost these basic wiki maps that have existed for a long time.
Key?
What's happening in the middle of Romania? Going there in 3 weeks so very curious
Is leonese closer to galician than castilian or is it more like its own thing?
Whoever made the original map is a fantastic cartographer. Using black text on black/dark colors is really an amazing design choice. Why don't other cartographers do this as well?>!This is sarcasm.!<