Romanian

Romanian is the easternmost of the Romance languages, descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman provinces along the lower Danube. After the Roman withdrawal from Dacia in the third century and the Slavic settlement of the Balkans, its spoken forms developed into Common Romanian between the sixth and eighth centuries.

By the tenth century this had split into northern Daco-Romanian and Istro-Romanian, and southern Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian. Slavic speech supplied a large share of its vocabulary and Old Church Slavonic long served religion and the princely chanceries.

Romanian was first written in Cyrillic letters in the later fifteenth century: the Hurmuzaki Psalter was copied around 1500 and Neacșu's letter of 1521 is the oldest precisely dated document. In 1780 the Transylvanian School printed its first grammar in Vienna, opening an age of re-latinization and a standardized literary language.