A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ROMANIAN LANGUAGE

In today's post, I would like to tell you about the Romanian language, which represent an extremely fascinating case among Romance languages, especially since it is often forgotten. It also happens that some people incorrectly ascribe Romanian to Slavic group. Therefore, where does this belief come from? 

Romanian is registered as a state language in Romania and in the Republic of Moldova and it's spoken worldwide by 28 million people. Like other Romance languages ​​such as French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, Romanian is derived from Vulgar Latin, a variety that is much more open to innovation and ignores the norms of the Classical Latin. It is also worth adding that Romanian remains the only case that consists of a local Thracian-Dacian background, which contains a limited number of words, because there is no scientific evidence to prove their origin. This also means you can find some similarities with Albanian in terms of the vocabulary.

Even though Romanian language is derived from Latin and may appear to have existed for a long time, the oldest surviving document available in Old Romanian was written in 1521. Neacșu Lupu sent out a warning in the form of a letter to Johannes Benkner about the imminent attack of the Ottoman Empire on Transylvania. Its beginning consisted of an introduction in Old Church Slavonic, which was the official language at the time, but, interestingly, all the rest were written only in Old Romanian, spoken cheifly by the lower classes.

The modern Romanian language appears in the second half of the 18th century, through a process of adopting words from the Romance languages. As a result, the Cyrillic was replaced by the Latin alphabet, thus the awareness of Latin roots began to increase among people. The another influences are, in general, explained by the contact between Romanians and other nations. For this reason, Romanian is full of words of Turkish, Greek, Hungarian, French or Italian origin, which shows how each country influenced the history of Romania over the centuries.

Romanian, apart from the vocabulary, differs in terms of grammar, because it is the exclusive Romance language that belongs to the Balkan language league. For me personally, it is an extremely fascinating case, so I hope you liked today's post and found out more about Romanian!