Romanian is the official and main language of Romania and Moldova. Romanian is part of the Eastern Romance sub-branch of Romance languages, a linguistic group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin which separated from the Western Romance languages in the course of the period from the 5th to the 8th centuries. To distinguish it within the Eastern Romance languages, in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. It is also spoken as a minority language by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania, and by the large Romanian diaspora. In total, it is spoken by 25 million people as a first language.
Several theories, in great extent mutually exclusive, address the issue of the origin of the Romanians. The Romanian language descends from the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken in the Roman provinces north of the "Jireček Line" in Late Antiquity. The theory of Daco-Roman continuity argues that the Romanians are mainly descended from the Daco-Romans, a people developing through the cohabitation of the native Dacians and the Roman colonists in the province of Dacia Traiana north of the river Danube. The competing immigrationist theory states that the Romanians' ethnogenesis commenced in the provinces south of the river with Romanized local populations spreading through mountain refuges, both south to Greece and north through the Carpathian Mountains. Other theories state that the Romanized local populations were present over a wide area on both sides of the Danube and the river itself did not constitute an obstacle to permanent exchanges in both directions; according to the "admigration" theory, migrations from the Balkan Peninsula to the lands north of the Danube contributed to the survival of the Romance-speaking population in these territories.
Dacian is an extinct language generally believed to be a member of the Indo-European language family that was spoken in the ancient region of Dacia.
The Balkan sprachbund or Balkan language area is an ensemble of areal features—similarities in grammar, syntax, vocabulary and phonology—among the languages of the Balkans. Several features are found across these languages though not all apply to every single language. The Balkan sprachbund is a prominent example of the sprachbund concept.
Common Romanian, also known as Ancient Romanian, or Proto-Romanian, is a comparatively reconstructed Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin and spoken by the ancestors of today's Romanians, Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, Istro-Romanians and related Balkan Latin peoples (Vlachs) between the 6th or 7th century AD and the 10th or 11th centuries AD. The evidence for this can be found in the fact that Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian share with each other their main language innovations comparative to Vulgar Latin on one hand, and distinctive from the other Romance languages on the other, according to Romanian linguist Marius Sala.
Țara Bârsei is a historic and ethnographic area in southeastern Transylvania, Romania with a mixed population of Romanians, Germans, and Hungarians.
The lexis of the Romanian language, a Romance language, has changed over the centuries as the language evolved from Vulgar Latin, to Common Romanian, to medieval, modern and contemporary Romanian. A large proportion of present-day Romanian lexis is not inherited from Latin and in some semantic areas loanwords far outnumber inherited ones making Romanian an example of a language with a high degree of lexical permeability.
The term Thraco-Illyrian refers to a hypothesis according to which the Daco-Thracian and Illyrian languages comprise a distinct branch of Indo-European. Thraco-Illyrian is also used as a term merely implying a Thracian-Illyrian interference, mixture or sprachbund, or as a shorthand way of saying that it is not determined whether a subject is to be considered as pertaining to Thracian or Illyrian. Downgraded to a geo-linguistic concept, these languages are referred to as Paleo-Balkan.
The linguistic classification of the ancient Thracian language has long been a matter of contention and uncertainty, and there are widely varying hypotheses regarding its position among other Paleo-Balkan languages. It is not contested, however, that the Thracian languages were Indo-European languages which had acquired satem characteristics by the time they are attested.
Iorgu Iordan was a Romanian linguist, philologist, diplomat, journalist, and left-wing agrarian, later communist, politician. The author of works on a large variety of topics, most of them dealing with issues of the Romanian language and Romance languages in general, he was elected a full member of the Romanian Academy in 1945. He was head of its Institute of Linguistics between 1949 and his retirement in 1962.
The history of the Romanian language started in Roman provinces north of the Jireček Line in Classical antiquity. There are three main hypotheses around its exact territory: the autochthony thesis, the discontinuation thesis, and the "as-well-as" thesis that supports the language development on both sides of the Danube. Between the 6th and 8th centuries AD, following the accumulated tendencies inherited from the vernacular Latin and, to a much smaller degree, the influences from an unidentified substratum, and in the context of a lessened power of the Roman central authority, the language evolved into Common Romanian. This proto-language then came into close contact with the Slavic languages and subsequently divided into Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, and Daco-Romanian. Because of limited attestations between the 6th and 16th centuries, entire stages from its history are reconstructed by researchers, often with proposed relative chronologies and loose limits.
Alexandru I. Philippide was a Romanian linguist and philologist. Educated in Iași and Halle, he taught high school for several years until 1893, when he secured a professorship at the University of Iași that he would hold until his death forty years later. He began publishing books on the Romanian language around the time he graduated from university, but it was not until he became a professor that he drew wider attention, thanks to a study of the language's history. Although not particularly ideological, he penned sharp, witty polemics directed at various intellectual figures, both at home and, in one noted case, in Germany.
Ioan Alexandru Brătescu-Voinești was a Romanian short story writer and politician. The scion of a minor aristocratic family from Târgoviște, he studied law and, as a young man, drew close to the Junimea circle and its patron Titu Maiorescu. He began publishing fiction as an adolescent, and put out his first book of stories in 1903; his work centered on the fading provincial milieu dominated by old class structures. Meanwhile, after a break with Maiorescu, he drew toward Viața Românească and Garabet Ibrăileanu. In 1907, Brătescu-Voinești entered the Romanian parliament, where he would serve for over three decades while his written output declined. In his later years, he became an outspoken anti-Semite and fascist, a stance that, following his country's defeat in World War II, gave way to anti-communism near the end of his life.
Theodor Capidan was an Ottoman-born Romanian linguist. An ethnic Aromanian from the Macedonia region, he studied at Leipzig before teaching school at Thessaloniki. Following the creation of Greater Romania at the end of World War I, Capidan followed his friend Sextil Pușcariu to the Transylvanian capital Cluj, where he spent nearly two decades, the most productive part of his career. He then taught in Bucharest for a further ten years and was marginalized late in life under the nascent communist regime. Capidan's major contributions involve studies of the Aromanians and the Megleno-Romanians, as well as their respective languages. His research extended to reciprocal influences between Romanian and the surrounding Slavic languages, the Eastern Romance substratum and the Balkan sprachbund, as well as toponymy. He made a significant contribution to projects for a Romanian-language dictionary and atlas.
The re-latinization of Romanian is the reinforcement of the Romance features of the Romanian language that started in the 18th and 19th centuries. Romanian adopted a Latin-based alphabet to replace the Cyrillic script and borrowed many words from French as well as from Latin and Italian, in order to acquire the lexical tools necessary for modernization. This deliberate process coined words for recently introduced objects or concepts (neologisms), added Latinate synonyms for some Slavic and other loanwords, and strengthened some Romance syntactic features. Some linguistic researchers emphasize that the use of this term is inappropriate as it conflates the larger process of modernization of the language with the more extreme, and in the end unsuccessful, current of eliminating non-Latin influences, and, secondly, the term's lack of precision is susceptible to lead to confusion as the Latin character of the Romanian language had already been noticed since at least the 15th century.
The Albanian–Eastern Romance linguistic parallels are subject of historical and contact linguistic research applied to the Albanian and Eastern Romance languages. It has also been studied to understand the history of Albanian and Eastern Romance speakers. The common phonological, morphological and syntactical features of the two language families have been studied for more than a century. Both are part of the Balkan sprachbund but there are certain elements shared only by Albanian and Eastern Romance languages that descended from Common Romanian. Aside from Latin, and from shared Greek, Slavic and Turkish elements, other characteristics and words are attributed to the Palaeo-Balkan linguistic base. Similarities between Eastern Romance and Albanian are not limited to their common Balkan features and the assumed common lexical items: the two language families share calques and proverbs, and display analogous phonetic changes, some of the latter especially shared between Tosk Albanian and Common Romanian.
Sorin Paliga is a Romanian linguist and politician. He is a university professor at the University of Bucharest. As a politician, he was the former mayor of Sector 3 of Bucharest from June 1996 to June 2000, and was affiliated with the National Liberal Party (PNL).
Grigore Brâncuș was a Romanian linguist and philologist, Albanologist, member of the Romanian Academy.
Although the direction of language contact between Romanian and Slavic languages is overwhelmingly towards Romanian as well as its other Eastern Romance sister languages, there is evidence of lesser influence in the opposite direction. Romanian and Eastern Romance influence on Slavic languages is generally limited to neighbouring languages, and of those to the South Slavic languages more than the northern counterparts.
