Proto-Romanian Language

Proto-Romanian Language

Proto-Romanian (also known as "Common Romanian", româna comună or "Ancient Romanian", străromâna) is a Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin and considered to have been spoken by the ancestors of today's Romanians and related Balkan Latin peoples (Vlachs) before ca. 900 AD.

In the 9th century Proto-Romanian already had a structure very distinct from the other Romance languages, with major differences in grammar, morphology and phonology and already was a member of the Balkan language area. Most of its features can be found in the modern Eastern Romance languages. It already contained around a hundred loans from Slavic languages, including words such as "trup" (body), as well as some Greek language loans via Vulgar Latin, but no Hungarian words.

According to the Romanian theory, it was broken into the following modern languages and their dialects:

• Romanian language (sometimes called Daco-Romanian to distinguish it from the rest of the Eastern Romance languages)
• Aromanian
• Megleno-Romanian
• Istro-Romanian

The first language that broke the unity was Aromanian, in the 9th century, followed shortly after by Megleno-Romanian. Istro-Romanian was the last to break the link with Daco-Romanian in the 11th century.

The place where Proto-Romanian formed is still under debate; most historians put it just to the north of the Jireček Line. See: Origin of Romanians.

The Roman occupation led to a Roman-Thracian syncretism, and similar to the case of other conquered civilisation (see Gallo-Roman culture developed in Roman Gaul), had as final result the Latinization of many Thracian tribes which were on the edge of the sphere of Latin influence, eventually resulting in the possible extinction of the Daco-Thracian language (unless, of course, Albanian is its descendant), although traces of it are still preserved in the Eastern Romance substratum. Starting from the 2nd century AD, the Latin spoken in the Danubian provinces starts to display its own distinctive features, separate from the rest of the Romance languages, including those of western Balkans (Dalmatian). The Thraco-Roman period of the Romanian language is usually delimited between the 2nd (or earlier, via cultural influence and economic ties) and the 6th or 7th century. It is divided, in turn, into two periods, with the division falling roughly in the 3rd-4th century. The Romanian Academy considers the 5th century as the latest date when the differences between Balkan Latin and western Latin could have appeared, and that between the 5th and 8th centuries, this new language – Romanian - switched from Latin speech, to a neolatine vernacular idiom, called Română comună.