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This article classifies all the Romance languages and dialects with regard to the phonological property of vowel length, phonemic and allophonic, considering its relationship to its correlate in phonetic substance, namely vocoid duration. It examines the rise and fall of vowel length in Romance, starting with a reference to Latin, where vowel length was contrastive as was consonant length, while in the Latin-Romance transition the former became dependent on the latter, as a part of a syllable structure conditioning. Consequently, Proto-Romance can be reconstructed as featuring an allophonic rule that lengthens stressed vowels in non-final open syllables (short, OSL) identical to that operating today in standard Italian, all Italo-Romance dialects south of the La Spezia-Rimini line, and Sardinian, which I will label type A languages. Due to a series of later changes, the remaining Romance languages and dialects lost this allophonic rule, which gave rise to either of the two further types: on the one hand, languages lacking contrastive gemination and contrastive vowel length (type B, including Daco- and Ibero-Romance all along their documented history, as well as, today, most of Gallo-Romance); and, on the other hand, languages lacking contrastive gemination but displaying contrastively long versus short vowels (type C, including most of northern Italo-Romance as well as part of Raeto- and Gallo-Romance, but which arguably stretched from the Apennines to the North Sea in the Middle Ages). This article examines all relevant sources of evidence, from Latin epigraphic inscriptions to experimental phonetic measurements, showing that they all chime perfectly with the picture just outlined. Needless to say, while the data from modern languages and dialects are observational, and those from older stages delivered by the written record need interpretation, reconstruction is, by definition, constructional: It can be supported by several sources of evidence but is in itself always provisional. Therefore, the story to be told here must be considered the best approximation to the historical truth that the present author deems reconstructible based on the available evidence.

From the perspective of phonological typology, the Romance languages exhibit considerable diversity, although they all originate from the same ancestor language, that is, “Vulgar Latin.” Most consonant inventories are of average size, with 20–23 phonemes, whereas typologically marked segments (e.g., palatal obstruents or retroflex consonants) only occur in a minority of Romance varieties. Instead, the number of vowel phonemes varies substantially, ranging from 5 in Spanish to 16 in French (which features front rounded vowels and nasal vowels). Substantial differences also exist regarding the treatment of unstressed vowels, which are subject to various degrees of reduction—including their deletion in both diachrony and synchrony. Consequently, such phonological processes yield various degrees of phonotactic complexity: While most Romance varieties are commonly counted among the so-called syllable languages, with a strong preference for open syllables and relatively simple consonant clusters ordered along the sonority scale, some dialects depart from this general tendency, allowing complex consonant clusters that may also run against the sonority sequencing generalization.

Syllable structure has helped shape the Germanic languages and, remarkably, the syllable template inherited from Germanic has remained relatively stable over nearly 2,000 years since our first written Germanic records. Onsets permit anywhere from zero to three consonants with only /ŋ/ barred from forming a word-initial simple onset. As for complex onsets, English has simplified many inherited clusters, for example, /kn/➔[n], while Yiddish has developed a wider range of possible clusters. What they have in common is that two-consonant clusters are formed from obstruents+sonorants, conforming to the Sonority Sequencing Generalization (SSG) stipulating that sonority should fall from the nucleus toward the syllable edges. This generalization, however, is violated by three-consonant clusters, namely sequences of a sibilant plus two consonants, usually an obstruent+liquid. The monophthongs and diphthongs filling the nucleus (as well as syllabic sonorants in some varieties) have a symbiotic relationship with the following coda mediated via the rhyme. Because stressed syllables are preferably bimoraic as per Prokosch’s Law, vowels are long in open syllables or when followed by at most one consonant. However, before two consonants (including orthographically), vowels are typically short. This plays out in unique ways in various languages. In some Scandinavian languages, consonants are lengthened after short vowels, thereby building contrasts via not only vowel length, but also consonant length, for example, Icelandic [ma:n] ‘young lady, acc.’ versus [man:] ‘man, acc.’ Thus, some scholars have argued that vowel length is allophonic in these Scandinavian languages, but phonemic in languages like German and English, for example, bit [bɪt] versus beat [bijt]. As for coda consonants, the SSG typically applies, creating a large number of clusters that are generally mirror images of permissible onsets. Many coda clusters have the shape sonorant+obstruent or liquid+nasal. These latter clusters may be broken up, for example, Afrikaans fil(ə)m ‘film’, or simplified in some languages, for example, Norwegian nd clusters➔n. Word finally, clusters tend to be more complex both in the coda, as well as due to the coronal appendix consonants added to the end of the coda. These appendices more often than not coincide with morphological complexity, for example, German Gast+s ‘guest, gen.sg.’, though not always, for example, Dutch herf-st ‘autumn’. Indeed, rules for syllabification highlight the differences between word-initial and medial onsets because maximizing the onset also does not hold across some morphemic boundaries, for example, Lie.be ‘love’ but lieb.lich ‘lovely’. Furthermore, while languages like Dutch tend to maximize onsets like German and English, they also balance that with the need for stressed syllables to be minimally bimoraic leading to the syllabification as-ter, for instance, rather than *a-ster with the onset maximized. And, lastly, following the Contact Law, syllable contacts are more preferred when there is a strong onset following a weak coda. This preference can account for differential syllable divisions, for example, p.l in Icelandic but .pl in Faroese, as well as ultimately changes in onsets such as West Germanic gemination and glide strengthening. What makes each language unique is how they have individually adapted the syllable template through time. It is these differences that provide a more complete perspective of Germanic syllable structure and form the basis for the current discussion.

The word accent system of Tokyo Japanese might look quite complex with a number of accent patterns and rules. However, recent research has shown that it is not as complex as has been assumed if one incorporates the notion of markedness into the analysis: nouns have only two productive accent patterns, the antepenultimate and the unaccented pattern, and different accent rules can be generalized if one focuses on these two productive accent patterns. The word accent system raises some new interesting issues. One of them concerns the fact that a majority of nouns are ‘unaccented,’ that is, they are pronounced with a rather flat pitch pattern, apparently violating the principle of obligatoriness. A careful analysis of noun accentuation reveals that this strange accent pattern occurs in some linguistically predictable structures. In morphologically simplex nouns, it typically tends to emerge in four-mora nouns ending in a sequence of light syllables. In compound nouns, on the other hand, it emerges due to multiple factors, such as compound-final deaccenting morphemes, deaccenting pseudo-morphemes, and some types of prosodic configurations. Japanese pitch accent exhibits an interesting aspect in its interactions with other phonological and linguistic structures. For example, the accent of compound nouns is closely related with rendaku, or sequential voicing; the choice between the accented and unaccented patterns in certain types of compound nouns correlates with the presence or absence of the sequential voicing. Moreover, whether the compound accent rule applies to a certain compound depends on its internal morphosyntactic configuration as well as its meaning; alternatively, the compound accent rule is blocked in certain types of morphosyntactic and semantic structures. Finally, careful analysis of word accent sheds new light on the syllable structure of the language, notably on two interrelated questions about diphthong-hood and super-heavy syllables. It provides crucial insight into ‘diphthongs,’ or the question of which vowel sequence constitutes a diphthong, against a vowel sequence across a syllable boundary. It also presents new evidence against trimoraic syllables in the language.

The field of study on the acquisition of phonological productive abilities by first-language learners in the Romance languages has been largely focused on three main languages: French, Portuguese, and Spanish, including various dialects of these languages spoken in Europe as well as in the Americas. In this article, we provide a comparative survey of this literature, with an emphasis on representational phonology. We also include in our discussion observations from the development of Catalan and Italian, and mention areas where these languages, as well as Romanian, another major Romance language, would provide welcome additions to our cross-linguistic comparisons. Together, the various studies we summarize reveal intricate patterns of development, in particular concerning the acquisition of consonants across different positions within the syllable, the word, and in relation to stress, documented from both monolingual and bilingual first-language learners can be found. The patterns observed across the different languages and dialects can generally be traced to formal properties of phone distributions, as entailed by mainstream theories of phonological representation, with variations also predicted by more functional aspects of speech, including phonetic factors and usage frequency. These results call for further empirical studies of phonological development, in particular concerning Romanian, in addition to Catalan and Italian, whose phonological and phonetic properties offer compelling grounds for the formulation and testing of models of phonology and phonological development.

One of the most fundamental problems in research on spoken language is to understand how the categorical, systemic knowledge that speakers have in the form of a phonological grammar maps onto the continuous, high-dimensional physical speech act that transmits the linguistic message. The invariant units of phonological analysis have no invariant analogue in the signal—any given phoneme can manifest itself in many possible variants, depending on context, speech rate, utterance position and the like, and the acoustic cues for a given phoneme are spread out over time across multiple linguistic units. Speakers and listeners are highly knowledgeable about the lawfully structured variation in the signal and they skillfully exploit articulatory and acoustic trading relations when speaking and perceiving. For the scientific description of spoken language understanding this association between abstract, discrete categories and continuous speech dynamics remains a formidable challenge. Articulatory Phonology and the associated Task Dynamic model present one particular proposal on how to step up to this challenge using the mathematics of dynamical systems with the central insight being that spoken language is fundamentally based on the production and perception of linguistically defined patterns of motion. In Articulatory Phonology, primitive units of phonological representation are called gestures. Gestures are defined based on linear second order differential equations, giving them inherent spatial and temporal specifications. Gestures control the vocal tract at a macroscopic level, harnessing the many degrees of freedom in the vocal tract into low-dimensional control units. Phonology, in this model, thus directly governs the spatial and temporal orchestration of vocal tract actions.