Origin of Romanians

The Romanians (and Vlachs) are a nation speaking Romanian, a Romance language and living in Central and Eastern Europe. The Origin of Romanians has been for a long time disputed and there are several theories:

Table of contents

1 Romanization of the Dacians 2 Dacians spoke a language close to Latin 3 Migration from South 4 External Links

Romanization of the Dacians

After the Romans conquered Dacia in 106, a process of "romanization" of the local populations took place, Dacians adopting the Roman language and customs. This is the classical theory of Daco-Romanian continuity, supported by most Romanian historians.

Arguments for:

• Extensive colonization of Dacia
• The colonists came from different provinces of the Roman empire. They had no common language except for Latin. In this multiethnic environment Latin, being the only common language of communication, might have quickly achieved the dominating position (American history furnishes similar examples).

Arguments against:

• The short time of occupation (only 165 years)
• Romans conquered only about 20% of Romania (parts of Transylvania and Oltenia)
• Most colonists were brought from distant provinces of the Roman Empire and they couldn't have spoken a language as close to literary Latin as Romanian.
• After the Roman withdrawal, a Dacian tribe (the Carpians - living in Moldavia) conquered the abandoned areas and probably imposed their language.

Dacians spoke a language close to Latin

This theory says that the Dacians spoke a language very close to Latin and so, the Romanization was not required.

Arguments for:

• It is thought that the Latins came to Italy in the around 1000 BC from this region.
• Romanian grammar has some classic Latin features that cannot be found in any other Romance language.

Arguments against:

• No ancient source claims that the language of Dacians is close to Latin.

Migration from South

A Romanic population from came from South and assimilated the Dacians. Some historians theorize that all the Dacians were killed in the battles for Dacia, but that is not generally accepted, since the Romans never conquered the whole Dacian teritory. This theory is largely supported by Hungarian historians, supporting the irredentist's claim of Transylvania.

Arguments for:

• Common words with Albanian, thought to be of Thracian or Illyrian origin.
• There are Vlachs living South of Danube speaking a dialect of Romanian (in Greece, Republic of Macedonia, etc).
• There are no traces of Teutonic influence in Romanian and we know that in the 5th and 6th century Dacia was inhabited by Teutonic tribes.
• There are no written documents confirming that Romanic peoples lived in Dacia in the period from leaving Dacia by Romans to the 10th century.

Arguments against:

• Dacians were probably a Thracian tribe, so the common words with Albanian (see above) could have come from the Dacian language.
• Slavic languages exerted an enormous influence on Romanian. But linguistic analyses of Romanian show that these Slavic languages were dialects of the Bulgarian-Macedonian group. If Romanians had come from a region to the north of Albania, they would have been under Serbian influence rather than Bulgarian-Macedonian. And the regions to the east and south of Albania were Greek-speaking, not Latin-speaking parts of the Roman empire.
• Romanian lacks any Greek loanwords for religious terms, the Orthodoxy being brought by Slavs, so it shows there was a Slavic buffer zone between Greece and Romanians.
• Romanian is very different from Dalmatian, so they probably developed in distant regions.
• Dacian toponyms kept (names of rivers: Samus - Somes, Marisia - Mures, Porata - Prut, etc; names of cities: Petrodava - Piatra Neamt, Varadia - Oradea)
• A 11th century Hungarian chronicle affirms that when the Magyars arrived in Pannonia, surrounding areas were inhabited by Vlachs (Romanians).
• No medieval chronicle mentions any migration of Romanic peoples from Balkans to Romania.

External Links

• Friesian.com: The Vlach Connection