French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are all Romance languages. How come French sounds so distinct?
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It doesn’t. They all sound distinct in about equal measures (some pairs are closer).
I’m portuguese, for me spanish is by far the closest, followed by Italian/french, and romanian is by far the weirdest.
When Rome conquered most of Europe, people were already speaking their own languages. There were the Gauls living in France and the Iberians living in spain.
When Rome made Gallia and Hispania part of the empire they made Latin their official language. They also did other things like blend their religions and culture to model rome.
Eventually, the locals started speaking different dialects, especially after the empire collapsed. The majority of people at the time did not travel outside of their town/region.
Language evolves and they evolved differently because of the different cultures and languages living there. If you want proof of languages evolving, just look at the zoomer speak today.
There are several factors in language development:
– substrate – in case of French it’s mostly Celtic languages.
– superstrate – Latin
-adstrates – mostly Germanic. It is said that French is the most Germanic of all Romance languages. Once Germanic tribes started to settle in what is now France, they quickly became the elites but adopted the popular language (which was a very late Latin already influenced by Celtic). The common theory is that the superstrate takes the vocabulary and some pronunciation from the substrate and the adstrate, keeping its grammatical features as a core (with some exceptions).
In case of Spanish and Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, even Occitan the proportions and character of those 3 factors were different, therefore they are different and sound different. It also matters at which moment Latin arrived to the area – Latin evolved as well, it was not exactly the same language when Gallia was colonized vs Lusitania or Iberia.
Additionally, in linguistics there is a theory of the language change – the change is always limited in time (for example during a certain period, all Latin “c” in certain position became “ch”. Once this change stopped being valid, new loan words with c in the same position kept the sound). Those changes can come from various sources – trade, fashion or purely because something is easier to spell.
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