For speakers of a language such as English in which the grammatical diminutive plays an insignificant part, the fact that other languages use the diminutive so frequently can seem rather quaint. But the diminutive is in fact a highly useful grammatical structure, one that speakers of languages without a diminutive (or with an anemic diminutive, as is the case in English) have to compensate for in various often less than elegant ways. This paper examines the grammatical diminutive in the Romance languages.
We should begin by defining the grammatical or syntactical diminutive as opposed to a lexical or semantic one. It is difficult to believe that there exists a language or a dialect that does not allow for a diminutive term: Nouns can be modified in all languages by words such as "little" - or "cute", probably the most common substitute within English for a syntactical diminutive. (English does, of course, have a "proper" diminutive - the suffix -kin that appears in "napkin" as well as in such endearments as "lambkin".) However, this combination of lexical terms such as "cute little girl" is different from the type of diminutive that becomes part of the morphology of the word itself. Such a morphological diminutive is present in all Romance languages, although the specific form that the diminutive takes varies from one language to the next as does its frequency and mode of usage.
Most Romance languages also allow other forms of speech to take on diminutive affixes, although quite often in this case (as when a diminutive ending is added to Portuguese adjectives or adverbs) the semantic effect is not to make something smaller but rather more intense (Harris and Vincent 90).
To use a personal example, a friend of mine whose first language is French has named her canary Jaunette - which seems at first as if it should mean "Little Yellow Thing" but in fact means (to the woman) something like "the yellowest thing that I've ever see...