Romanization and the Formation of the Romanian People

The Romanian people emerged from a synthesis of the Getic-Dacian population and Roman elements, in a process called ethnogenesis, which was completed in the 6th–8th centuries. Romanian is a Romance language that developed from spoken Latin in eastern Europe, alongside Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. About 60–70% of the basic vocabulary comes from Latin, and the grammatical structure is of Latin origin. The words for the essentials of life – house, bread, water, man, mother, father, sky – confirm this Roman origin, a fact stressed by generations of philologists.

A small number of words of Dacian origin have survived in Romanian: for example, mal (“bank”), moș (“old man”), brânză (“cheese”), balaur (“dragon”), viezure (“badger”), brad (“fir”) and zgardă (“collar”), according to some linguists. The Dacian substratum also left the names of rivers: Mureș, Olt, Argeș, Siret, Someș. The Aurelian withdrawal did not interrupt the continuity of the population: archaeology proves the existence of local settlements after 271, and late Roman coins, pottery and Christian cult objects have been found across the whole territory of the former province. The Sântana de Mureș–Cernyakhov culture of the 3rd–4th centuries shows the presence of a mixture of peoples.

Christianity, which spread in Latin, played an important part in preserving the Latin character of the language. Essential words of the religious vocabulary are of Latin origin: biserică (basilica), cruce (crux), Dumnezeu (Domine Deus), a boteza (“to baptize”), înger (“angel”), păcat (“sin”), Paști (Pascha), Crăciun (calatio). This shows that the people received Christianity in its popular form, before the arrival of the Slavs. Dobruja had an intense Christian life as early as the 4th century: Saint Sabbas the Goth and John Cassian, as well as the monk Dionysius Exiguus, born in Scythia Minor, contributed to the history of European Christianity.

In medieval sources, the Romanians appear under the names Vlachs, Wallachians, Volokhs or Olahs, terms of Germanic origin, adopted by the Slavs and the Hungarians for Romance-speaking populations. They called themselves rumâni, from the Latin romanus. The four branches of the people – the Daco-Romanians, Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians and Istro-Romanians – arose as a result of migrations and of Slavicization in the Balkans. Medieval documents, such as the Gesta Hungarorum, written by the notary of King Béla, known as Anonymus, and the Byzantine chronicles, mention the Romanians as a distinct people.

The first written attestation of the Romanian language in a text is attributed to the phrase “torna, torna, fratre” from the year 587 or 588, recorded by the chronicler Theophylact Simocatta in an episode of the Byzantine campaign against the Avars. The oldest complete text in Romanian remains the Letter of Neacșu of Câmpulung, from 1521, addressed to the mayor of Brașov, Hans Benkner. Romanian ethnogenesis was not a rapid phenomenon but the result of a long evolution in which the Dacian element, the Roman one and the influences of the migrating peoples fused into a distinct people, anchored in the Carpathian–Danubian territory.