ProtoRomance

ProtoRomance is the hypothetical earliest form of the Romance language family, reconstructed by historical linguists as the common ancestor of languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. It is not directly attested in any written records; instead, its features are inferred through the comparative method from later Romance languages and from Vulgar Latin, the everyday speech of the Roman Empire.

Scholarly consensus places ProtoRomance as emerging after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, during a transitional period roughly from the 5th to the 8th centuries CE. It is associated with a broad geographic area that encompassed western and southern Europe, where Latin varieties evolved into distinct Romance tongues. The exact dating and internal branching remain topics of debate, with some scholars emphasizing a more gradual continuum of regional varieties rather than a single uniform proto-stage.

Linguistically, ProtoRomance is characterized by significant simplification of Latin inflectional morphology, including reduced nominal case endings and simplified verb conjugations. It also marks the development of analytic periphrastic tenses and the emergence of definite articles from demonstratives, a hallmark of Romance syntax. Phonologically, changes shared across the Romance languages—such as vowel reduction and consonant adjustments—are inferred as part of its phonetic profile.

Its importance lies in explaining the high degree of systematic similarity among the Romance languages and in tracing how regional varieties diversified from a common, post-Latin proto-stage. Ongoing research continues to refine its features and its place within the wider Indo-European and Italic language history.