Slavic influence on Romanian

The Slavic influence on Romanian is noticeable on all linguistic levels: lexis, phonetics, morphology and syntax. This is due to the migration of Slavic tribes who traversed the territory of present-day Romania during the 6th century AD, corresponding with the formative stage of Eastern Romance. About 14% of the Romanian language is of Slavic origin.

The intercultural process also enriched the Slavic languages, which borrowed Vulgar Latin words and terms from Romanian, as, for example, mezin<medzin (from Latin medianus), the younger child, second-born, in the middle, which became 'mĕzinu' in some Slavic languages.

Romanian is a Romance language, belonging to the Eastern Romance group. It descends from Danubian Latin, a vernacular that emerged from the Romanization of Dacia and the Balkan peninsula and formed in the period of the 6th or 7th to 8th centuries. The substratum is Dacian (or "Thraco-Dacian"), the superstratum is Slavic. Old Slavic influence began either in the 6th–7th or 8th–9th centuries according to scholars, ending in the 11th–12th centuries. An analysis in the mid-20th century indicated 11.5% Slavic borrowings.

The introduction of Slavic in post-Roman Dacia was similar to the appearance of Germanic dialects in the Western Roman Empire, where Gallic Latin, Iberian Latin, and Italian dialects became somewhat Germanized. However, due to a systematically decimated Latin-speaking population during the medieval migrations, Slavic remained spoken for much longer, even after the assimilation of Slavs into the Romanian people. This partly explains why spoken Romanian is somewhat less intelligible to speakers of Western Romance languages, which was influenced by Germanic tribes who were almost Romanized.

While Dacia was part of the Roman Empire for less than two centuries, various Slavic tribes crossed, ruled and settled the former Roman province from the 6th to the 12th centuries. Their presence was stronger in Moldova and Bessarabia, where in the 16th century Rusyn-speaking Slavs made up about a third of the population. The Moldavian principality was called by the Russian sources as Russo-Vlahia (Русовлахия). Although the Slavs migrated from the north, they were smoothly assimilated north of the lower Danube to the Latin-speaking population. Meanwhile, the Slavs assimilated large parts of the Romanized population (the Vlachs) south of the Danube, in the Balkans (South Slavs); thus the presence of Slavs was also stronger in the southern areas of the Danube.

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