Research group Romance Linguistics - RomLing

More than one billion people around the world speak a Romance language as their first or shared first language. The most wide-spread Romance languages are Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian – i.e. the same four languages that can be studied at Stockholm University.
Drönarbild över Stockholms Universitet i höstskrud

Foto: Sören Andersson

Spanish, French or Portuguese is the official language of more than thirty countries in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Oceania. In addition, many so-called creole languages have developed from French, Portuguese and Spanish in Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

Romance Linguistics – history

Romance Linguistics has a long history in Europe and America, as well as in the Nordic countries. In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the main focus was on philology and historical-comparative studies on the Romance language area in Europe (Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and Romania). Over the course of the 20th century, Romance Linguistics came to include more and more areas – the syntax and semantics of contemporary Romance languages, to begin with, and eventually other fields of linguistic research, such as the connection between language, culture and society, language use in different genres and types of activities, language contact between Romance and other languages and – last but not least – language acquisition.

Romance Linguistics at Stockholm University

In Stockholm, the first professorship in Romance Languages was established in 1937. There are currently linguistic professorships in all four of the languages French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
Between 2001 and 2012, the two departments for Romance studies at the time – the Department of French, Italian and Classical Languages and the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies – had close collaborations within the framework of the National Doctoral Programme in Romance Languages (FoRom), which today has produced 28 doctorates in the subjects of French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. The doctoral students in FoRom have, through courses and joint seminars, been able to achieve receptive proficiency in Romance languages other than “their own”.


RomLing is the name of the network of researchers in Romance Languages who either have employment at the Stockholm University or who are indirectly linked to the University through project participation. The network also includes all doctoral students in Romance languages with language or discourse dissertation projects (at the Department of Romance Studies and Classics).

• Discourse and interaction linguistics
• Historisk lingvistik och utgivning av äldre texter
• Sociolingvistik med inriktning på variation och språkkontakt
• Språkinlärning och språkdidaktik
• Syntax och semantik
• Översättningsvetenskap och kontrastiv lingvistik


The research on Romance languages that is actively conducted at Stockholm University today is very broad-ranging and can be grouped into the following areas:

In March 2011, the Vice-Chancellor determined Stockholm University’s new leading research areas. Romance Linguistics is one of these areas. The research network RomLing was founded in light of this decision and the good experiences of the collaboration in FoRom.




There are no research project connections.

Department of Romance Studies and Classics

Alice Duhan, Romklass, awarded Swedish Research Council grant

Alice Duhan, currently postdoctoral research fellow at Romklass, has been awarded research funding from the Swedish Research Council in the annual call for humanities and social sciences. Her three-year project, "Translingual Writing post-1945 and the Multilingual Spaces of French Fiction", examines literary texts written by second language authors in French and asks how this literature can contribute to a re-reading of recent French literary history from the vantage point of multilingualism. Authors who write and publish literary texts in their second, third or fourth chronologically acquired language have always existed. It is indeed perhaps surprising that it is only in the last twenty years that a specialized research field has emerged that studies this “translingual” literature as a specific sub-category within literary studies. This project focuses on translingual fiction in French from 1945 onwards, a period when translingual writers not only came to play a particularly prominent role within French-language literature, but also increasingly came to be viewed – and often to perceive themselves – as belonging to a specific “translingual” literary tradition. The study aims to establish for the first time an overview and periodization of translingual writing in French from the mid-twentieth century to today, and will also contribute to our understanding of how translingual writing has been theorised and received in a specifically French-language context.

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