Traits régionaux en protoroman

Abstract

Every spoken linguistic system shared by the community in its whole linguistic field has, in addition, structurally related regional variants covering a smaller space; for instance, present-day French soixante-dix of the common norm, has septante as a regionalism in eastern France, Belgium and French Switzerland. This implies that Proto-Romance, the mother tongue of Romance, has also had a common norm with regionalisms; the problem, however, is that the comparative method, the only one enabling us to reconstruct a proto-language, has been conceived for the reconstruction of the common norm only; fortunately, the existence of certain types of regionalisms may nevertheless be proven by means of alternative methods, as the present paper is meant to show