Introduction: the written language in the history of Romance

The Romance languages are often seen as being a uniquely interesting language family because of our extensive knowledge of their parent, Latin, the wealth of medieval and modern texts which can serve as data in tracing their evolution (Malkiel 1974a) and the diversity revealed in the existence of a number of present-day standard Romance languages and the many local variants, some now defunct, recorded by dialect geographers from the early twentieth century onwards. Linguistic variation is evident in all these sources, yet their exploitation has largely been carried out within the context of techniques which were a legacy of comparative reconstruction, in which the history of discrete languages was envisaged as a successive series of ‘states’ (in the case of the Romance languages, from Latin to the present day). Such an approach is now increasingly acknowledged to depend on a naively monolithic view of language, and in Romance Linguistics it has had a number of undesirable consequences.

Latin as a stage in the history of Romance

In the first place, and most seriously for our present purposes, ‘Latin’, however this term is to be understood more precisely, has largely been equated with the first state of Romanist enquiry. Histories of the Romance languages are still entitled and construed as ‘From Latin to modern Language X’.