This manual provides a detailed presentation of the various Romance languages as they appear in texts written by Jews, mostly using the Hebrew alphabet. It gives a comprehensive overview of the Jews and the Romance languages in the Middle Ages (part I), as well as after the expulsions (part II). These sections are dedicated to Judaeo-Romance texts and linguistic traditions mainly from Italy, northern and southern France (French and Occitan), and the Iberian Peninsula (Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese). The Judaeo-Spanish varieties of the 20th and 21st centuries are discussed in a separate section (part III), due to the fact that Judaeo-Spanish can be considered an independent language. This section includes detailed descriptions of its phonetics/phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax.

This manual provides a detailed presentation of the various Romance languages as they appear in texts written by Jews, mostly using the Hebrew alphabet. It gives a comprehensive overview of the Jews and the Romance languages in the Middle Ages (part I), as well as after the expulsions (part II). These sections are dedicated to Judaeo-Romance texts and linguistic traditions mainly from Italy, northern and southern France (French and Occitan), and the Iberian Peninsula (Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese). The Judaeo-Spanish varieties of the 20th and 21st centuries are discussed in a separate section (part III), due to the fact that Judaeo-Spanish can be considered an independent language. This section includes detailed descriptions of its phonetics/phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax.

The Romance languages offer a particularly fertile ground for the exploration of the relationship between language and society in different social contexts and communities. Focusing on a wide range of Romance languages – from national languages to minoritised varieties – this volume explores questions concerning linguistic diversity and multilingualism, language contact, medium and genre, variation and change. It will interest researchers and policy-makers alike.

Deixis as a field of research has generated increased interest in recent years. It is crucial for a number of different subdisciplines: pragmatics, semantics, cognitive and contrastive linguistics, to name just a few. The subject is of particular interest to experts and students, philosophers, teachers, philologists, and psychologists interested in the study of their language or in comparing linguistic structures. The different deictic structures – not only the items themselves, but also the oppositions between them – reflect the fact that neither the notions of space, time, person nor our use of them are identical cross-culturally. This diversity is not restricted to the difference between languages, but also appears among related dialects and language varieties. This volume will provide an overview of the field, focusing on Romance languages, but also reaching beyond this perspective. Chapters on diachronic developments (language change), comparisons with other (non-)European languages, and on interfaces with neighboring fields of interest are also included. The editors and authors hope that readers, regardless of their familiarity with Romance languages, will gain new insights into deixis in general, and into the similarities and differences among deictic structures used in the languages of the world.

This manual provides an extensive overview of the importance and use of Romance languages in the media, both in a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Its chapters discuss language in television and the new media, the language of advertising, or special cases such as translation platforms or subtitling. Separate chapters are dedicated to minority languages and smaller varieties such as Galician and Picard, and to methodological approaches such as linguistic discourse analysis and writing process research.

Language standardization is an ongoing process based on the notions of linguistic correctness and models. This manual contains thirty-six chapters that deal with the theories of linguistic norms and give a comprehensive up-to-date description and analysis of the standardization processes in the Romance languages. The first section presents the essential approaches to the concept of linguistic norm ranging from antiquity to the present, and includes individual chapters on the notion of linguistic norms and correctness in classical grammar and rhetoric, in the Prague School, in the linguistic theory of Eugenio Coseriu, in sociolinguistics as well as in pragmatics, cognitive and discourse linguistics. The second section focuses on the application of these notions with respect to the Romance languages. It examines in detail the normative grammar and the normative dictionary as the reference tools for language codification and modernization of those languages that have a long and well-established written tradition, i.e. Romanian, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese. Furthermore, the volume offers a discussion of the key issues regarding the standardization of the ‘minor’ Romance languages as well as Creoles.

With more than two thousand languages spread over its territory, multilingualism is a common reality in Africa. The main official languages of most African countries are Indo-European, in many instances Romance. As they were primarily brought to Africa in the era of colonization, the areas discussed in this volume are thirty-five states that were once ruled by Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, or Spain, and the African regions still belonging to three of them. Twenty-six states are presented in relation to French, four to Italian, six to Portuguese, and two to Spanish. They are considered in separate chapters according to their sociolinguistic situation, linguistic history, external language policy, linguistic characteristics, and internal language policy. The result is a comprehensive overview of the Romance languages in modern-day Africa. It follows a coherent structure, offers linguistic and sociolinguistic information, and illustrates language contact situations, power relations, as well as the cross-fertilization and mutual enrichment emerging from the interplay of languages and cultures in Africa.