The naming of meals

BECAUSE of social inequality and different cultural habits and life-styles, the names and times for meals can vary in many European languages and cultures. In a simplified way, however, we can distinguish three main meals, in a tripartite scheme that has existed since Roman times. Of these meals, the last two have different names which are usually the object of sociolinguistic variation. This is particularly noticeable in international languages like English, French and Spanish, where along with their differences one can notice a certain parallelism in present and past usage, which immediately leads us to think of similar cultural referents. In this article I will focus primarily on English while also commenting, for purposes of comparison, on French and Spanish.