Intro -- Table of Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgements -- Figures -- Symbols, abbreviations and punctuation -- Part 1: The study of Romance linguistics -- Branches of the Indo-European language family -- 1 The key characteristics of language and linguistics -- 2 Emergence and development of Romance linguistics -- Part 2: Romance languages and varieties today -- 3 Presentation of the Romance languages -- 4 Variational linguistics and the Romance languages -- Part 3: The internal structures of the Romance languages and their history -- 5 Domains of language and historical periodisation -- 6 Phonetics, phonology and graphemics -- 7 Inflectional morphology -- 8 Syntax -- 9 Lexis -- Part 4: External history of the Romance languages and varieties -- 10 External history of the Romance languages and varieties -- Part 5: Practical and ideological aspects of research and teaching in Romance linguistics -- 11 Philological approaches and corpus linguistics -- 12 From theory to practical work -- Epilogue: On the usefulness of (Romance) linguistics -- References -- Subject index -- Name index -- Works cited.