French sound to you like a Romance/latin language ?

[Damião de Góis]

Doesn't sound like other romance languages or like other germanic languages in my opinion. Out of the two i'm not sure which it sounds closer to, so i can't answer your question.

[le penalty]

Ok thx for your answers ! For the grammar italian look the most close but for the pronunciation french is just unique

[rashka]

French also has a huge Celtic influence.

[Óttar]

French also has a huge Celtic influence.

There are Celtic "glottal stops." Also the word mouton "sheep" is from continental Celtic (Gaulish), but I don't know the degree to which French is Celtic influenced.

[rashka]

quote
Gallic words brought by the Normans in 1066

“The Normans came from Scandinavia early in the tenth century and wrested the valley of the Seine out of the hands of Charles the Simple, the then king of the French. The language spoken by the people of France was a broken-down form of spoken Latin, but retaining many Gaulish words.”

These are some of the words: bag, bargain, barter, barrel, basin, basket, budget, bonnet, car, caul, garter, ribbon, mutton, gown, mitten, motley, rogue, varlet, vassal, truant.


------------------------
From Wikipedia:
The Celtic population of Gaul spoke Gaulish, which is moderately well attested, with what appears to be wide dialectal variation including one distinctive variety, Lepontic. While the French language evolved from Vulgar Latin (i.e., a Latinized popular language called sermo uulgaris), it was nonetheless influenced by Gaulish, especially in its phonological development. Chief among these are sandhi phenomena (liaison, enchainement, lenition), the loss of unstressed syllables, and the vowel system (e.g. raising [u], [o] → [y], [u], fronting stressed [a], [ɔ] → [e], [ø]/[œ]). Syntactic oddities attributable to Gaulish include the intensive prefix ro- ~ re- (cited in the Vienna glossary, 5th cent.) (cf. luire "to glimmer" vs. reluire "to shine"; related to Irish ro- and Welsh rhy- "very"), emphatic structures, prepositional periphrastic phrases to render verbal aspect, the semantic development of oui "yes", aveugle "blind", and so on.

[Sikeliot]

When you hear a french speaking that sound more southern/romance (italian,spanish,portuguese) or more northern/germanic (german,english ...) ?

Portuguese doesn't sound like a Romance language either, actually. Its sound is quite Slavic. Sounds nothing like Spanish and Italian.

If I could count the number of times people have asked if my grandmother spoke Russian when they hear her speak

[YOUTUBE]lgfq4-CtDM4[/YOUTUBE]

[Peyrol]

It isn't only french that has ''celtic influences'', but an entire category of languages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallo-Romance_languages



Geographical distribution of gallo-romance languages:

[Žołnir]

Romance ofc. but very special one.

[Sikeliot]

To me Spanish, Italian, Occitan, Catalan, and Romanian all have a general similar "Latin" sound (of course Romanian has some Slavic influence in sound but it still sounds like an odd Italian to me) and French and Portuguese are way out in left field in terms of how they sound.

[Comte Arnau]

The only thing that happens with French is that erosion has gone deeeper than in the other Romance languages, so that a word like AQUA has become O in just a few centuries, while Italians say it almost in the same way as Romans did. They also changed the typical Romance trilled r for a weird guttural sound a few centuries ago, so that makes them look even more different. But apart from these things and a larger number of words coming from Frankish, French is clearly a Romance language.