This standard introduction to the spoken romance languages, which has long been out of print, is now being released in an up-to-date and revised new edition. The topic “spoken language” has developed into one of the most interesting fields of research – and not only in linguistics. From linguistic theory-based preliminary observations on speech and writing to the topic of language variation, the objective of this book is to present the most significant problems of spoken language, in contrast to written language, for the three major romance languages.

The main chapters of this work focus, on the one hand, on the universal characteristics of the spoken word, in particular the textual-pragmatic, syntactic and semantic phenomena. On the other hand, the special features of each of the spoken varieties of French, Italian and Spanish are taken into consideration. This is initially approached from a diachronic (historical) linguistic perspective; the focus here is on the development of individual linguistic spatial variety. This is followed by an exact synchronic description of the characteristics of the individual linguistic varieties at the phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical levels. All linguistic phenomena of today’s synchrony are interpreted on the basis of original corpus material. This work regards itself as a contribution to variety linguistics focused on speech and writing.