Article by Oana Iosifidis
The Romanian dialects are the several regional varieties of the Romanian language.
The dialects are divided into two types, northern and southern, but further subdivisions are less clear, so the number of dialects varies between two and occasionally twenty.
But most sources recognize a number of 4 dialects. If you started to take Romanian lessons, maybe you heard about them already.
From a mix of Latin and Balkan languages, these 4 Romanian dialects have developed and are spoken in countries like Serbia, Albania, Greece, Kosovo, Bulgaria and Croatia.
The Romanian dialects are:
- Dacoromanian, the basis of the standard language, spoken in Romania and Moldova in several regional variants;
- Aromanian (also called Macedoromanian), spoken in scattered communities in Greece, the Republic of North Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, and Serbia;
- Meglenoromanian, a nearly extinct dialect of northern Greece and southeastern North Macedonia;
- Istroromanian, also nearly extinct, is spoken in Istria, a peninsula that is part of Croatia and Slovenia.
Mutual intelligibility between the major dialects is difficult; the Meglenoromanian, Istroromanian, and Aromanian are sometimes classed as languages distinct from Romanian, or Dacoromanian, which has many slightly varying dialects of its own. Moldovan, the national language of Moldova, is a form of Dacoromanian. It is written in the Latin alphabet.
The standard language of Romania is based on a Walachian variety of Dacoromanian, the majority group of dialects.
It was developed mainly by religious writers of the Orthodox church, in the 17th century. It includes features from a number of dialects, though Bucharest usage provides the current model.
Dacoromanian is fairly uniform but shows greater dialectal diversity in the Transilvanian Alps, from which region the language may have spread to the plains. During the Soviet era, the language of Moldova was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, called “Moldavian,” and held by Soviet scholars to be an independent Romance language.
Currently called either Romanian or Moldovan, since 1989 the language has been written in the Roman alphabet.
The first known Dacoromanian text is a private letter of Walachian origin dated 1521, though some manuscript translations of religious texts show Transylvanian dialect features and may be even older.
The oldest printed texts are “The Slavo-Romanian Gospels”(1551–52; Evangheliarul slavo-român ) of Sibiu and the works of Deacon Coresi, beginning in 1559.
The vast majority of early texts used Cyrillic script, the Roman (Latin) alphabet having been officially adopted in 1859, after the union of Walachia and Moldavia.
Literature in the Romanian language began to flourish much later, in the 19th century, when the emerging nation turned toward France and other Romance countries, for cultural inspiration.
These influences had important consequences for the language, triggering the so-called re-Romanization of Romanian.
While the Megaloromanian (Meglenitic) and Istroromanian dialects are both nearly extinct, Aromanian is more vigorous.
Numbers have probably decreased considerably, but certainly before 1940 Aromanians were often prominent businessmen in their communities. The first known inscription in Aromanian, dated 1731, was found in 1952 at Ardenita, Albania; texts date to the end of the 18th century, and literary texts were published in the 19th and 20th centuries (mostly in Bucharest).
There are few texts written in Megleno-Romanian. There are several collections of folk literature, and one scientific work, a brochure on silkworm raising.
Not all linguists recognize those as dialects of the same Romanian, some considering them four independent languages.
Learning a foreign language becomes even more interesting if you start learning about the history of the country and other interesting facts like the subject of this article. It helps you connect to the country and its people.
Whether you chose to take Romanian online classes or learn on your own for a period, feel free to browse our site for more resources.
