La Spezia-Rimini Line

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Historically, the La Spezia-Rimini Line marked a series of isoglosses that distinguished Northern Italian speech from that of Tuscany, home of the standard Italian language.

Eastern and Western Romania

The La Spezia-Rimini Line (sometimes also referred to as the Massa-Senigallia Line), in the linguistics of the Romance languages, is a line that demarcates a number of important isoglosses that distinguish Romance languages south and east of the line from Romance languages north and west of it. Romance languages on the eastern half of it include Italian and the Vlach languages (Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian), while Spanish, French, Catalan, Portuguese as well as Northern Italian languages are representatives of the western group.

The line is also the frontier between Central Italian, (Tuscan dialects to the south, whence Standard Italian is derived) and Northern Italian (Western Romance, to the north).

The line runs through northern Italy, very roughly from the cities of La Spezia to Rimini (some linguists say ^[1]that the line actually runs through Massa and Senigallia about 40 kilometers further to the south, and would more accurately be called the Massa-Senigallia Line).

North and west of the line (excluding some Northern Italian varieties, such as Ligurian, which probably once had the characteristic but lost it under influence from standard Italian), the plural of nouns was drawn from the Latin accusative case, and once was marked with /s/ regardless of grammatical gender or declension. South and east of the line, the plurals of nouns were usually taken from the Latin nominative case, and mark plurals with vowels. Compare the plurals of cognate nouns in Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French and Latin:

Generally speaking the western Romance languages show common innovations that the eastern Romance languages tend to lack. Another isogloss that falls on the La Spezia-Rimini line deals with the restructured voicing of voiceless consonants that occur between vowels. Thus, Latin focus/focum (meaning "fire") becomes fuoco in Italian and foc in Romanian, but fogo in Portuguese and Northern Italian languages and fuego in Spanish. Voicing, or further weakening, even to loss of these consonants is characteristic of the western branch of Romance; their retention is characteristic of eastern Romance. There are, however, exceptions which undermine this isogloss: Gascon dialects in south-west France and Aragonese in northern Aragon (Spain) - i.e. geographically Western Romance - also retain the original Latin voiceless stop between vowels. Indeed, the significance of the La Spezia-Rimini line is often challenged by specialists within both Italian dialectology and Romance dialectology. One reason for this is that while it demarcates preservation (and expansion) of phonemic geminate consonants (Central and Southern Italy) from their simplification (in Northern Italy, Gaul, and Iberia), the areas affected do not correspond consistently with those defined by voicing criteria. Romanian, which on the basis of lack of voicing is classified with Central and Southern Italian, has undergone simplification of geminates, a defining characteristic of Western Romance.

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[edit] See also

• Classification of Romance languages
• Romance plurals
• Plural inflection in Eastern Lombard
• Gothic Line