By the end of the course, the student will be able:
- master general knowledge about the history and the sociolinguistic and political situation of various Romance languages;
- understand the typological and genetic relationships between Romance languages;
- put in place methodical analysis in comparative etymology of Romance languages;
- describe and analyses formal similarities and differences between major Romance languages.
Main themes
The course is divided in two parts:
1) Description of the emergence and development of various Romance languages, from latin to nowadays, in their sociolinguistic (ex. standardisation process, official and symbolic status, geographic distribution) and political (ex. linguistic unification and language policies) dimension.
2) On the basis of etymological case studies (discovery of etymological correspondences between Latin and Romance languages), formal and comparative description of the main phonological and lexical characteristics of Romance languages.