French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are all Romance languages. How come French sounds so distinct?
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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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