The Latin Island

One morning, in the years after 106, the streets of Sarmizegetusa ring with voices from across the empire — colonists brought in, as Eutropius puts it, “from the whole Roman world” after Trajan's two Dacian wars, of 101–102 and 105–106, unloading their sacks in a barely founded province. The Latin they brought would stay long after the administration left.

The province lasted nearly 170 years. Around 271 Aurelian sanctioned the final abandonment of Dacia and withdrew behind the Danube, founding a new Dacia Aureliana in the south, later split in two, one half governed from Serdica — today Sofia. North of the river, the Latin kept being spoken, cut off from Rome.

Cut off is the word: Romanian took shape between the fifth and the seventh centuries, in the linguist G. Ivănescu's dating, and grew up alone — a Latin island 1,137 kilometres from Rome, as the Rome–Bucharest arc shows.

Dacia Traiana was a Roman province for nearly 170 years, until the reigns of Gallienus and Aurelian when it was abandoned (c. 271 CE).

World History Encyclopedia, “Dacia”

In 587, on campaign against the Avars and Slovenes, a soldier shouted “torna, torna, fratre!” — turn, turn, brother — in his native tongue, as Theophylact Simocatta and Theophanes tell it. Romanian scholars long read it as the first written trace of Balkan Romance; a 2024 study by Elisabeta Negrău hears army Latin instead, and finds the form “fratre” only in later copies.

Then paper. The Hurmuzaki Psalter, copied, by its watermarks, around the first decade after 1500, is the oldest known writing in Romanian — a bilingual copy. The oldest precisely dated document is a merchant's letter: in late June 1521 Neacșu of Câmpulung wrote in Cyrillic to the mayor of Brașov, warning that the Turks had left Sofia and sailed up the Danube. The letter even names “Țara Rumânească” — the Romanian Land.

Print followed: the Sibiu Gospel of 1551–1553, then Coresi's Tetraevangelion at Brașov in 1561 — the first edition with the Gospel solely in Romanian — and the Palia de la Orăștie in 1582, the first Old Testament books, translated by Transylvanian Calvinist pastors.

I pak dau știre domniie tale za lucrul turcilor, cum am auzit eu că împăratul au eșit den Sofiia…

Neacșu's letter, Câmpulung, late June 1521

Around 1561, while Coresi was setting his type at Brașov, a buyer at the market would ask for “pâinea” — the bread, with the article glued to the end of the word, as today: omul, the man. Romanian is the Romance language that put its article last — the -l of omul is Latin illum, the dictionaries say, a demonstrative, as in the other Romance languages — and it shares the trick with Albanian, Bulgarian and Macedonian: the Balkan sprachbund.

The infinitive mostly went the same way: Romanian says vreau să cânt, “I want to sing”, with the conjunctive where Latin had an infinitive. The future is built with a vrea, “to want”; the genitive and dative merged; Slavic loans piled up. Old bones, new joints.

And the old bones are real: cases where French keeps none, a neuter gender, a vocative in -e — frate! The first printed grammar to describe all this, Micu and Șincai's Elementa linguae daco-romanae, came off Joseph von Kurzböck's press in Vienna in 1780 — Micu was then chaplain at the Greek-Catholic college of St Barbara there — and pushed for a Latin alphabet.

The definite articles are usually attached to the end of the noun as enclitics.

the grammar books' own summary

Between 1895 and 1907 Gustav Weigand went from village to village, 752 of them, notebook in hand, asking how people said everyday words: the answers fill the Linguistischer Atlas des dacorumänischen Sprachgebietes, issued at Leipzig in nine parts and completed in 1909. From Common Romanian, spoken until about the tenth century, descend four dialects: Daco-Romanian north of the Danube, Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian south of the Jireček Line, and Istro-Romanian — perhaps as few as 120 fluent speakers left in Istria.

Romanian was written in Cyrillic until the late nineteenth century: transitional alphabets mixed Latin letters in from 1830 to 1860, and the Latin alphabet became official in Wallachia and Transylvania in 1860, in Moldavia in 1862. The earliest Latin-script writing is older — a late sixteenth-century Transylvanian text in Hungarian spelling.

Today Romanian is official in Romania and Moldova and spoken as a first language by some 22 million people, by Ethnologue's count. Moldova's Constitutional Court ruled in December 2013 that the state language is Romanian; Parliament wrote it into every law on 16 March 2023, promulgated on 22 March.

the Declaration of Independence made a clear distinction, expressly opting for the term “Romanian language”.

Constitutional Court of Moldova, Judgment no. 36 of 5 December 2013, §108 (official English translation)