So, about 2000 years ago, there were these people in the land that is now called Romania. These people, themselves called Dacians (pronounced dachyanz), were of Indo-European stock, meaning that they belonged to, as defined by dictionary.com, “a large, widespread family of languages, the surviving branches of which include Italic, Slavic, Baltic, Hellenic, Celtic, Germanic and Indo-Iranian, spoken by about half the world’s population: English, Spanish, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, Albanian, Lithuanian, Armenian, Persian, Hindi and Hittite are all Indo-European languages”. And so was Dacian. But that language isn’t exactly spoken anymore. Verily, about 160 words of Dacian origin still exist in modern Romania. But we’ll get to that later.
Romanian is a Romance language, an East Romance language at that, spoken by about 24 to 26 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova, though it is also spoken in the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (Serbia), where it and five other languages have official status. Also, in parts of northern Bulgarian along the Danube, some villages are home to Romanian speakers. How these people got there – or how they ended up speaking what is now Romanian – began with the Dacians.
According to Dennis Deletant’s textbook Colloquial Romanian, the Dacians were believed to have spoken a Thracian tongue. Dacian words that remain in Romanian today point to an industrious family-oriented pastoral society with knowledge of viticulture and pisciculture. Examples include: baci = shepherd making cheese, branza = cheese, brad = fir-tree, copil = child, prunc = baby, zestre = dowry, balaur = dragon, mal = shore.
Given the not insignificant number of cognates with the Albanian language, some linguists think that the Albanians were Dacians who were not Romanised and migrated south.
In 106 CE, the Romans defeated the Dacians and part of their land (Oltenia/Wallachia Minor, Banat and Transylvania) became a Roman province for the next 165 years. As tends to happen when a land is colonised, local languages felt a linguistic influence, here Latin, with Vulgar Latin becoming the language of administration and commerce. Latin vocabularly also entered due to Christianity and church. As Constantin C Giurescu wrote in The Making of the Romanian People and Language, “most of the Romanian words designating the essential notions connected with the Christian faith are of Latin origin”.
Roman pull out in the late third century set the language free, in a sense, to develop independently of much outside influence. The language broke apart into four dialects, but, given its geographical placement, it wasn’t much influenced at all, actually, until sometime between the seventh to 10th century, when Slavonic words and thoughts came along with the Byzantine Empire. This is in contrast to Aromanian (a sort of Romanian dialect, also known as Macedo-Romanian, Arumanian or Vlach), which, while it follows the same grammatical structure as Romanian, has a very different vocabulary.
It appears that the Slavs learned Latin, and the Dacians adopted Slavicisms. This is also reason for the unique pronunciation of Romanian, as compared with other Romance languages. [For example, the initial letter e of personal pronouns is palletised: “el” (he) is pronounced “yel”.]
Old Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the Romanian Orthodox Church (compared with the countries of Western and Central Europe, which used Latin) also greatly influened the language from the Middle Ages until the 18th century.
The Daco-Romanian dialect (what most people just call Romanian, but called Daco-Romanian by linguists to distinguish it from other East Romance language; spoken throughout Romania and Moldova) varies little from place to place. Thus, a Romanian speaker from Moldova uses the same language as a Romanian speaker from the Serbian Banat. This indicates relatively recent migration.
Among speakers of the language today, the largest distinguising factor is accent/pronunciation.
Romanian remains one of the most uniform languages in Europe, and developed isolated from the other Romance languages.
Instead of Germanic influence, it took on words and features of Greek, Turkish and Hungarian. As compared with the other Romance languages, it has maintained declinisions (the three cases are nominative/accusative, genitive/dative and vocative) and a neuter gender. Modern Romanian is closest to Italian, and not mutually intellible for the average person to Catalan, French, Portuguese or Spanish. Though, French and Italian have given a number of words to the Romanian vocabulary in the modern era.
The Romanian Academy moderates and maintains the standards of the language, with the Institutul Limbii Romane promoting its learning and use.
Romanian earns membership in the Balkan linguistic union (Balkansprachbund). This term classifies the languages of the Balkans that belong to various Indo-European branches, like Albanian, Greek, Romance and Slavic. These languages have similarities in grammar, syntax, vocabulary and phonology, enough to compel researchers to dig farther for a common heritage, or at least common influence. Such characteristics include the formation of the future and perfect tenses, the avoidance of infinitive, a postposed (enclitic) definite article and the syncretism of genitive and dative case.
In the early ninth century, Byzantine chronicler Theophanes the Confessor provided the first written record of a Romanic language in his recount of a 587 military expedition against the Avars, in which 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!”).
More than 700 years had passed when, in June 1521, Neacsu of Campulung wrote to the mayor of Brasov about an imminent attack of the Turks, thus providing the oldest existing record of written Romanian. Like most early Romanian writings, it was written in a Cyrillic alphabet similar to that used for Old Church Slavonic. Cyrillic actually remained in use in Walachia and Moldova until 1859.
In the late 16th century, Cyrillic fell out of use, with favour leaning towards Hungarian alphabetic conventions. Shortly after that, at least as far as history goes, as it was all of some 200 years later, scholars, noting Romanian’s Latin roots, recommended a spelling system based on Italian. Gradually this took precedence and in 1860, Romanian writing was first officially regulated. The Soviet Republic of Moldova, however, used a version of the Cyrillic alphabet until 1989, when it adoped the Romanian version of the Latin alphabet.
