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Romanian Language Origin

Romanian originated as a Romance language spoken in Romania and Moldova. It developed from Latin which was introduced when the Roman province of Dacia was established in 106 AD. Romanian remained isolated from other Romance languages until the 19th century, making it very uniform. It was influenced by neighboring languages like Slavic, Greek, Hungarian and Turkish during the Byzantine period and the migration of neighboring peoples, incorporating vocabulary from these languages while retaining its Romance grammatical structure from Latin.

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356 views

Romanian Language Origin

Romanian originated as a Romance language spoken in Romania and Moldova. It developed from Latin which was introduced when the Roman province of Dacia was established in 106 AD. Romanian remained isolated from other Romance languages until the 19th century, making it very uniform. It was influenced by neighboring languages like Slavic, Greek, Hungarian and Turkish during the Byzantine period and the migration of neighboring peoples, incorporating vocabulary from these languages while retaining its Romance grammatical structure from Latin.

Uploaded by

andreea24hody
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Romanian language origin

Romanian is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people,


primarily in Romania and Moldova. The Dacians, an Indo-European people, were the
ancient inhabitants of Romanian territory. They were defeated by the Romans in 106 and
parts of Dacia became roman province. This province was colonized by the Romans, who
brought with them their own language : Latin, Vulgar Latin more precisely. That was the
language of administration and commerce. But the romanization process ended in 271
when the Romans retired.
It received little influence from other Romance languages until the modern
period (the middle of the 19th century), and is therefore one of the most uniform
languages in Europe. It is the most important of the remaining Eastern Romance
languages and is more conservative than other Romance languages.
All the dialects of Romanian are believed to have been unified in a Proto-
Romanian language up to sometime between the 7th and 10th centuries, when the area
came under the influence of the Byzantine Empire. It was then that Romanian became
influenced by the Slavic languages and to some degree the Greek. Romanian was
influenced by Slavic, Greek, Turkish, and Hungarian, while the other Romance languages
were influenced by Germanic, Celtic and Arabic.
Romanian belongs to the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family,
having much in common with languages such as French, Italian, Portuguese, and
Spanish. However, the languages closest to Romanian are the other Eastern Romance
languages, spoken south of Danube: Aromanian/Macedo-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian
and Istro-Romanian, which are sometimes classified as dialects of Romanian.

Other influences :
The first language to influence the Latin spoken in Dacia was the Dacian
language, but there are only few words in present Romanian that can be related to this
language. Most of those words are related to pastoral life, for example : ”balaur”
(dragon), ”brânză” (cheese) and ”mal” (shore).
While most of Romanian grammar and morphology are based on Latin, there
are some features that are shared only with other languages of the Balkans and not found
in other Romance languages.
The Slavic influences on Romanian are especially noticeable and can be
observed at all linguistic levels: lexis, phonetics, morphology and syntax. About 20% of
Romanian words are of Slavic origin. This is due to the migration of Slavic tribes who
traversed the territory of present-day Romania during the early evolution of the language.
Other small contributions to the Romanian language had: Greek, for example:
”buzunar” (meaning ”pocket”), Hungarian (”oraș” which means ”town”), German
(”cartof” meaning ”potato”) and Turkish (”cafea” meaning ”coffee”).

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