Italic Branch of the Indo-European Language Family

The evolution of languages is constant even though minor and major changes are not usually apparent unless looking at the broader picture over a long period of time. Vocabulary is lost in the process, pronunciation and syntax are changed, and more vocabulary is added. Any language in the world has evolved from another, and most of these proto languages have suffered extinction. The Indo-European macro-family has seen this evolution and it has given rise to smaller micro-families that are each derived from a common ancestor. The Proto-Indo-European, in which the ‘proto’ stands for a reconstructed language from evidence that was given at a later point in time, gave rise to the Indo-European branch of the language tree, which in turn has been subdivided into ten different micro-families including Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Balkan, Hellenic, Anatolian, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and Tocharian (Slocum). In addition, each of these families is broken up based on the common language that is shared. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family, which is further split into Latino-Faliscan, Osco-Umbrian, and Romance.

The Italic languages, as its name suggest, come from the ancient Indo-European languages that were spoken in Italy. The most prominent of these languages is Latin, which mostly gave rise to many of the surviving Italic languages in the modern age. Latin began as a local language among others and it was not anticipated to dominate among its sister languages (Fortson 245). It was originally spoken among a tribe that worked on agricultural settlements named Latini, whose origins were in a region called Latium. Latium was located on the western coast and spread out centrall...

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... language. The earliest forms of French was called Old French and lasted until the fifteenth century. Modern day French was developed from the dominant dialect in the twelfth and thirteenth century in central France, around Paris. Norman French, located in northern France, spread to England in the eleventh century and became known as Anglo-Norman as it developed in England but English eventually dominated and wiped it out. Occitan was spoken in the South and developed greatly during the Middle Ages until the North overtook them in the early thirteenth century. Occitan can still be found in southern France today (Fortson 258). Spanish

Works Cited

"Faliscan language." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 18 Nov. 2013. .