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Some opinions about Romanian ethnogenesis

The origin of the Romanians has been for centuries subject to scholarly debate, often driven by political bias. Two basic theories can be differentiated; one theory posits Daco-Romanian continuity and the other is an immigrationist theory, but interim views also exist. Scholars of the first school argue that the Romanians are mainly descended from the Daco-Romans, a people emerging through the cohabitation of the native Dacians and the Latin-speaking Roman colonists in the Roman province of Dacia north of the river Danube. Accordingly, they suggest that a significant part of the territory of modern Romania has continuously been inhabited by the Romanians' ancestors. Followers of the opposite view argue that the Romanians' ethnogenesis commenced in Moesia and other provinces south of the Danube. Consequently, they propose a northward migration of the Romanians across the river.

Theories on the Romanian's ethnogenesis

Romanians, known by the exonym Vlachs in the Middle Ages, speak a language descended from Latin which was once spoken in south-eastern Europe. Inscriptions from the Roman period prove that a line can be drawn through the Balkan Peninsula, which separated the Latin-speaking northern provinces, including Dacia, Moesia and Pannonia from the southern regions where Greek remained the predominant language. Eastern Romance now has four variants, which are former dialects of a Proto-Romanian language. Daco-Romanian, the official language of Romania, is the most widespread of the four variants.Speakers of the Aromanian language live in scattered communities in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Macedonia.Another two, by now nearly extinct variants, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian, are spoken in some villages in Macedonia and Greece, and in Croatia, respectively. The exact place where these idioms developed has for centuries been debated by scholars because there is "a certain disaccord between the effective process of Roman expansion and Romanization and the present ethnic configuration of Southeastern Europe".Political and ideological considerations, including the dispute between Hungary and Romania over Transylvania, have also

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colored these scholarly discussions. Accordingly, theories on the Romanian homeland can be divided into two or more groups.

Theory of Daco-Romanian continuity

Followers of the continuity theory argue that the Romanians descended from the inhabitants of "Dacia Traiana", the one-time province encompassing some regions of present-day Romania for around 165 years. In these scholars' view, the close contacts between the autochthonous Dacians and the Roman colonists led to the formation of the Romanian people because many provincials stayed behind after the Roman Empire abandoned its territories north of the Danube. Thereafter the process of Romanization expanded to Maramureş, Moldavia and other neighboring regions due to the free movement of people across the former imperial borders. The spread of Christianity also contributed to the process, since Latin was the language of liturgy among the Daco-Roman.

Although for a millennium migratory peoples invaded the lands now forming Romania, a sedentary Romance-speaking population survived. These lands remained the main "center of Romanization" after the Slavs began to assimilate the Latin-speaking population of the Balkans in the 6th century. Even so, the Slavs had a major impact on the Romanians' ancestors who adopted Old Church Slavonic as their liturgical language.

Immigrationist theory

Gottfried Schramm, Herbert J. Izzo and other scholars who support the immigrationist theory propose that the Romanians descended from the Romanized inhabitants of the provinces to the south of the Danube, which were under Roman rule for more than 500 years. Following the collapse of the empire's frontiers around 620, some of this population moved south to regions where Latin had not been widely spoken. Others took refuge in the Balkan Mountains where they adopted an itinerant form of sheep- and goat-breeding. Their mobile lifestyle contributed to their spread in the mountainous zones.

The Romanians' ancestors came into close contact with sedentary Slavic-speaking communities in the 10th century at the latest. They adopted Old Church Slavonic

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liturgy in the First Bulgarian Empire, and preserved it along with their Orthodox Christian faith even after their northward migration across the Danube began. They were first employed as border guards along the southeastern frontiers of the Kingdom of Hungary and later settled in other sparsely inhabited regions as well. Although sheep-breeding remained their principal economic activity for centuries, their permanent settlements are also documented from the 1330s.