The Romance Languages offer several interesting perspectives in research via their common Latin origin. The history of these languages starts more than a thousand years ago and even more if one goes back to what is often called Vulgar Latin, the everyday Latin used by the native speakers in the Roman empire, Romania. Hence, it is possible to describe linguistic features diachronically in phonetics, morphology and syntax by studying one or several Romance languages, separately or parallelly. Even if there are linguistic differences, the similarities predominate. A classic example of one phenomenon is the future tense. There are written evidence of the French future tense already in the 9th century and this tense is practically the same in modern French. Its correspondence in Spanish and Italian are very similar.
Scandinavia has a long tradition in research on Romance Languages, especially in French, but also in Spanish philology. The scholars in RomLing focus on editing French and Italian texts. These texts are quite late, dating from the Middle French period (14th and 15th centuries) and they concern in particular the medieval chronicles and the lives of saints. In Italian, rhetorical figures are studied in texts from the 14th and 15th centuries.
Linguistic aspects that have been studied by the RomLing scholars concern syntax (the participial clauses and the connector ”car” (=for)), morphosyntax (demonstrative pronouns), vocabulary (synonymy and the suffix ”-issime”) and also gender and language.
In the field of reception studies, scholars have lately started to examine how famous literary texts, written in French, were transformed in different ways in Scandinavia and then integrated in the early texts, giving birth to a new Scandinavian literature.