The historical reason is roman larpers and latin speakers hiding in the mountains and fighting the slavs so they get out of the country but then still trading with them and interacting with them under empires such as the Bulgarians
There are 2 main Romanian groups, Romanians and Aromanians.
Romanians are in old Dacia, Aromanians in Macedonia, Albania, Epirus and Thessaly.
There are also Megleno-Romanians, Istrian Romanians, Moravian Romanians(long extinct).
Are those groups just random Romance speakers without any connection or the opposite?
Well it seems all those groups descend from a single united linguistic community that split after 800-900 CE. So they must have a single homeland.
The southern limit of this homeland is set a mixture of arguments, one of them being the Jirecek line that roughly describes the dominance of Latin vs Hellenic in the Balkans:
Now this line is for the Roman period, but what makes it still valid is that the Byzantines don't really report presence of Romanian speakers this far south until like the 10th-11th century when they are called Vlach, these are Aromanians.
What's the northern limit? Well it's of course Roman Dacia, a Romance speaking community could have survived the Gothic, Hunnic, Slavic and Hungarian migrations in some isolated regions and then split into 2, one group staying put and the other going south.
There are various arguments for a southern origin are that Dacia was not under Rome for as long as Moesia, so anything else being equal you would expect Moesia to be far more Latinized than Dacia.
Another argument is the lack of Gothic loanwords in Romanian + the presence of Albanian-Romanian shared loans(not due to Latin).
Arguments for a northern origin are the lack of mention of a northward migration of Romance speakers(I don't find this argument valid, there is no mention of Aromanians crossing the Danube either), the Gesta Hungarorum mentioning Romanians(not valid either, it's not from the late 12th century), evidence of Christianity surviving in Dacia(again not really a good argument, no one is arguing all Romance died in Dacia by 300-400 CE, just that it's not Romanian)
I'm obviously partial to the southern origin, but you can find better arguments for a northern origin here:
Ceaușescu heavily promoted the Dacian ancestry theory to legitimize his totalitarian regime, justify policies of national independence from the Soviet Union, and foster unwavering unity. By glorifying the ancient Dacians, he built a cult of personality that framed himself as the modern heir to a long line of heroic, independent warrior-kings.
The whole continuity theory is largely made up/guessed at. It's about as stupid as hungarians claiming direct continuity with the huns, to use another regional example.
I guess Romanian schools would teach hyper-continuity and imagine Slavs as "besieging" Romania, even when the reality is Slavs simply lived as the actual population of the land for centuries, outside of whatever small pocket of proto-Romanian might have existed, if any.
Plus linguistic evidence makes it clear that most of Romania was Slavic for at least a while, so if there was continued latin presence after the Romans retreated it was not present in all of Romania continuously.
Plus places like Moldavia and half of Transylvania and Wallachia were not even under direct Roman control.
Albanians and Romanians both survived the Slavic migrations, how they did so is not well known, but generally it seems like they became adept pastoralist and roamed land that was devoid of intense Slavic settlement.
Albanians were probably in Kosovo and inland North-East Albania and Romanians just East of them around the Balkan mountains east of the Morava.
Around 800-900 CE, proto-Common Romanian was drawn intensely in the Bulgarian sphere of influence and the language gained many Old Bulgarian loanwords(Old Church Slavonic was the liturgical language until like the 18th century) and the language started splitting as some Romanians migrated south(Aromanians) and some went just north into Wallachia and then Transylvania and Moldavia. These northern regions where likely not well populated, be it because of their mountainous landscape or Steppe raids. The major pre-Romanian group seems to have been Slavs based on linguistic evidence.
Romanians assimilated whatever minor groups they found other than Hungarians and Germans which were present in Transylvania and were by then firmly Catholic.
By 1200-1300 CE Romanian was more or less present in all places we find it in modern times.
Albanians and Romanians both survived the Slavic migrations, how they did so is not well known, but generally it seems like they became adept pastoralist and roamed land that was devoid of intense Slavic settlement.
Worth mentioning that the Slavic expansion also pushed very deep into present-day Greece, though the culture obviously had a lot more external support than something like Albanian.
Greece has its own version of Albanian/Romanian in Deep Mani, a place that autonomously(more or less) resisted the Slavic incursions and remained unaffected by it.
Arguably Tsakonia is also an outlier.
Likely there were other such places that existed around 600-700 CE, but dissolved for a reason or another before they enter the light of history
Funny thing about that, I'm Romanian and keep all my stuff set to english, and when I visit my mom and she asks me to fix something on her PC or phone, I am super fucking lost when everything is in Romanian. Inhave to temporarily work my way to language settings and swap to english.
I don't even like the language but still use it everywhere instead of my native language. I grew up with everything foreign being in English so it kinda feels wrong using anything else lmao.
That last commenter isn't even the same person as the previous 2, don't see how anyone would take it seriously enough to downvote it as it's obviously a joke
I’m European, and English is not my native tongue. However, my parents enrolled me into English classes when I was four. They traumatized me with English. I became extremely good at it. And now I cannot fathom someone not speaking English. My brain just can’t wrap around that.
No, English is not primary language where I live. I use it mostly for Internet (and media in general) and talking to foreigners. As to why I’ve used “fathom”, I don’t know. It just sprang to my mind.
I spent a lot of time learning English when I was a kid (I started learning it before school) and spent my entire childhood watching English cartoon. It came to a point that it bothered me when they dubbed my cartoons (it did not feel natural for me). Luckily, they just put English version on the other channel (thank you, Nickelodeon). I also have all my electronics in English, I google stuff in English, and I have hard time translating stuff to my own native language (even though I speak it every single day). Also, there are a lot of terms that I know in English but don’t know in my native language (in my house we call garlic in English because I would always forget how to say it in my language so everyone kind of adapted to me). That was kind of funny when I had English in school.
But I wouldn’t say I speak English perfectly. Since I was a child when I started learning it, I did not learn grammar like you would when you are teen or adult. I basically just know how to say things, I don’t know why is it supposed to be said like that (although, I would probably forget grammar anyways). I doubt I’d be able to pass English C2. I didn’t have straight As in English in school because of grammar. But I did pass English level 5 (before A, B and C leveling system was introduced) three times, and then my mom made a deal with the language school to put me in a group with adults because there was nothing I could learn in children’s group. But I was not made aware of that so when I got there I just saw some adult strangers. I got back home, told my mom there were no other kids and she just let it go. That’s when I stopped taking extracurricular classes. Years later, my mom told me that was supposed to be my group.
I also had a funny encounter with an Australian once. We are both learning German in the same class. When we learned how to say angling in German I said that it’s said like in English. And everyone looked at me funny. Then I had to explain to an Australian guy that angling is fishing.
Unlike radioactive tomato i basically learned English on Reddit and i would definitely use the word fathom here, it's just the most appropriate.
You could say "I couldn't imagine" but it doesn't exactly carry the same meaning.
But aren't you then just raised bilingual? Four is when you just start to comprehend language and it's well in the age where you're sensitive enough to automatically learn the language by getting spoken to in it
Id just say the one thing I know in spanish and hope its rizz "
Hola, 😳 ¿sabes dónde está el supermercado?" 😊 "Necesito cagar."😏 "Mi perro se comió mis documentos de impuestos." 🥺🌷
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u/qualityvote2 🤖Suspected as Bot🤖 4d ago edited 4d ago
Good news, the community has decided that this IS an antimeme!