The paper gives a brief overview of the most important results achieved by
Linguistic geography and Areal linguistics in the field of Romance Linguistics. The origin of
Linguistic geography goes back to Gilliéron and his school. These scholars developed a
‘stratigraphic’ mode of interpretation of linguistic maps, aiming to modify the linguistic model of
the Neogrammarians, based on sound laws. In the early 1960s, in the light of Saussurean and post-
Saussurean linguistics, the methods, techniques and achievements of Linguistic geography seemed
to many scholars to be outdated. This was the ‘crisis’ of Linguistic geography. This is not to say
that linguistic geography never had and never will have any use. From the beginning linguistic
maps brought to light interesting phenomena that have become accepted wisdom in linguistics and
dialectology. One of these concerns the fact that, at least in some cases, dialects are typically
identified by a bundle of isoglosses. Moreover, Matteo Bartoli ‘areal norms’ represent the most
important attempt to explain the distribution of linguistic forms in geographical space.
