Background
A number of Romance languages were once spoken in Southeastern Europe for centuries, but the Dalmatian branch of this "Balkan Romance" disappeared centuries ago. Although the surviving Eastern group of Balkan Romance has in the meantime split into four major variants, their common features suggest that all of them originated from the same idiom. Daco-Romanian, the largest among these variants, is spoken by more than 20 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova. Arumanian has about 350,000 speakers who mainly live in the mountainous zones of Albania, Greece and Macedonia. Some thousand people from the wider region of Thessaloniki speak the third variant which is known as Megleno-Romanian. The smallest Eastern Romance variant, Istro-Romanian is used by less than 1,500 speakers in Istria. All Eastern Romance variants share a number of peculiarities which differentiate them to such an extent from other Romance languages that Friedrich Diez – the first Romance philologist – even stated in 1836 that Romanian was "only a semi-Romance language". These peculiarities encompass, for instance, the common features of the Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and other languages which together form the "Balkan linguistic union".
Modern scholars still debate the venue of the Romanian language's formation. There are two main concurring theories, but further hypotheses also exist. The followers of the "theory of the Daco-Romanian continuity" propose that the Romanian language primarily developed from the Latin spoken in "Dacia Traiana" province to the north of the Lower Danube. The opposite "immigrationist theory" suggests that Romanian developed in Moesia, Lower Pannonia or other provinces to the south of the Danube. It is without doubt that a line – the so called "Jireček Line" – can be drawn across the Balkan Peninsula which divided it into two parts in Roman times: north of this line, Latin was predominantly used, while to the south of it, Greek remained the main language of communication.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Romanian Language
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