| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
| Romanian (româna) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken | Romania, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Serbia, Hungary, the Balkans, Canada, USA, Germany. |
| Region | Eastern Europe |
| Total speakers | 28 million |
| Ranking | 36 |
| Dialects | 4 |
| Genetic classification | Indo-European |
| Official status | |
| Official language | Romania, Moldova, Serbia and Montenegro ( Vojvodina) |
| Regulated by | Academia Româna |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | ro |
| ISO 639-2 | rum, rou |
| SIL | RUM |
The Romanian territory was inhabited in ancient times by the Dacians, who spoke an Indo-European language, the Dacian languageThe Dacian language was an Indo-European language spoken by the ancient people of Dacia and it is a source of dispute about its origin and characteristics. While there are almost no written documents in Dacian, we can find much about it from: the toponyms about which there is very little knowledge.
Some words found only in Romanian (in all dialects) or with a cognate in Albanian languageAlbanian or Shqip is a language spoken by some six million inhabitants of the western Balkan peninsula in the south-eastern Europe ( Albanians) and by a small number of people in Calabria, southern Italy. Some eminent scholars in the field of Albanian lan are generally thought to be inherited from Dacian, many of them being related to the pastoral life. (see: List of Dacian wordsThe Romanian language contains about 200-300 words claimed by many Romanian scholars to be of Dacian language origin. A few of these also have cognates in the Albanian language. Some of these etymologies are more controversial than others: because there a). Some linguists believe that in fact, Albanians are Dacians that were not romanized and migrated south.
There is another theory that Dacian was fairly close to Latin, however there are no proofs available to support this claim and is generally discarded by linguists.
After the Roman conquest, Dacia was transformed in a Roman province and Vulgar Latin was used for administration and commerce. It is noteworthy that only a small portion of Dacia/Romania was conquered, most of the teritory being inhabited by the Free Dacians , populations that were never under the Roman rule. The popular theory about continuous settlement of Dacia from Roman times seems to be fairly controversial. For further discussion, see Origin of Romanians.
Due to its geographical isolation, Romanian was probably the first language that split and until the modern age was not influenced by other Romance languages, so the grammar is roughly similar to that of Latin, keeping declensions and the neuter gender, unlike any other Romance language.
| Map of Balkans with regions inhabited by Romanians/Vlachs highlighted |
All dialects of Romanian are believed to have been unified in a common language until sometime between the 7th and the 10th century, before the Slavonic languages interfered with Romanian. Aromanian has very few Slavonic words. Also, the variations in the Daco-Romanian dialect (spoken throughout Romania) are very small, which is quite remarkable, because until the Modern Era there was almost no connection between the Romanians in various regions. The use of this uniform Daco-Romanian dialect extends well beyond the borders of the Romanian state: a Romanian-speaker from Moldova speaks the same language as a Romanian-speaker from Serbian Banat.
The first written record of a Romanic language spoken in the Middle Ages in the Balkans was written by the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes Confessor in the 6th century about a military expedition against the Avars from 587, when a Vlach muleteer accompanying the Byzantine army noticed that the load was falling from one of the animals and shouted to a companion "Torna, torna fratre" (meaning "Return, return brother!").