Romanian Language, Romance language derived mainly from the Latin language spoken in the ancient Roman province of Dacia, which coincides roughly with modern Romania. Romanian has four principal dialects. Daco-Romanian, or Romanian proper, is spoken by about 21 million people in Romania, in parts of Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Moldova, where it is officially called Moldovan (although widely considered identical to Romanian). Macedo-Romanian, or Aromanian, has about 300 thousand speakers in various Balkan countries. Some 12 thousand people still speak Megleno-Romanian, or Meglenitic, in Greece northwest of Thessaloníki, and Istro-Romanian, in Istria. These dialects are classified by some linguists as independent languages.
The Romanian literary language is based on the Daco-Romanian of the historic region of Walachia, in southern Romania. Romanian preserves some Latin traits lost in other Romance languages, notably the inflection of nouns. Romanian also has some characteristics common to the languages spoken in the Balkan Peninsula (most of which are not Romance languages), such as the placement of the definite article after the noun. Romanian has absorbed an unusually large number of words from the Slavic languages, the Greek language, the Turkish language, the Hungarian language, and the Albanian language.
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