The Slavic influence on Romanian is noticeable on all linguistic levels: lexis, phonetics, morphology and syntax.
Overview
Romanian (or Daco-Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian form the Eastern Romance branch of the Romance languages. The four languages are descended from a common ancestor developed from the Vulgar Latin spoken in southeastern Europe during Classical Antiquity. The territory where the language formed was a large one, consisting of both the north and the south of the Danube (encompassing the regions of Dacia, Moesia, and possibly Illyria), more precisely to the north of the Jiriček Line. Proto-Slavic—the root from which the modern Slavic languages developed—emerged during the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. The Early Slavs lived in the plains north of the Carpathian Mountains or along the middle course of the Dnieper River. Their expansion accelerated after the fall of the Hunnic Empire in the middle of the 5th century AD. Significant Slavic-speaking groups moved across the Lower Danube and settled in the Balkan Peninsula. By the end of the 7th century, Slavic became the dominant language throughout most of the Balkans. Studies of the South Slavic languages revealed that Bulgarian and Serbian developed for centuries in two distant territories, separated by significant non-Slavic groups. It is unclear when contact began among the Early Slavs and speakers of Common Romanian. According to one scholarly theory, the Romance-speaking communities had already come into contact with the Slavs in the 5th or 6th centuries. To explain the lack of early Slav loanwords in Romanian, linguist Kim Schulte claims that the "contact situation can be assumed to have been one of cohabitation and regular interaction between Romanians and Slavs, without a great degree of cultural dominance of either of the two". In contrast, linguist Gottfried Schramm proposes that the Romanians' ancestors lived in the mountains, surrounded by Albanian-speaking communities and thus separated from the Slavs of the lowlands until the 10th century. Otherwise, he continues, the fact that Slavic loanwords appeared in Albanian earlier than in Romanian could hardly be explained. Contacts with Slavic-speaking groups intensified before the disintegration of Common Romanian and about 80 Slavic loanwords are still present in all four Eastern Romance variants. The high number of Slavic loanwords and the shared morphological and syntactical elements of Romanian and Bulgarian show that modern Romanian developed from the tongue of a mixed, bilingual population and through frequent intermarriages. According to another scholarly approach, these elements do not reveal a widespread bilingualism or "racial intermixture", being the consequence of "cultural intercourse" deriving from the bilingualism of the literary class. Romanians adopted Old Church Slavonic as the language of liturgy, which gave it the "status of a cultural superstate language, particularly in semantic fields related to religious beliefs and practices". Greek Catholic (or Uniate) priests were the first Romanian intellectuals to make efforts to demonstrate the Latin origin of Romanian in Transylvania during the 18th century. They developed a Latin-based alphabet to replace the Cyrillic writing system and promoted the use of Latin terms in place of words of Slavic origin. Wallachian writers started to advance the adoption of loanwords from Romance languages (especially from French and Italian) in the 19th century.
Vocabulary
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