This book investigates the changes that affected vowel length during the development of Latin into the Romance languages and dialects. In Latin, vowel length was contrastive (e.g. pila 'ball' vs. pila 'pile', like English bit vs. beat), but no modern Romance language has retained that same contrast. However, many non-standard Romance dialects (as well as French, up to the early 20th century) have developed novel vowel length contrasts, which are investigated in detail here.

This book explores grammatical gender in the Romance languages and dialects and its evolution from Latin. It outlines the significant diversity found in the Romance varieties in this regard and uses this variation to show that traditional accounts of the loss of neuter gender cannot be correct.