The Roman occupation led to a
Thraco-Roman syncretism, and similar to the case of other conquered civilisations (see, for example, how
Gallo-Roman culture developed in
Roman Gaul) led to the Latinization of many
Thracian tribes which were on the edge of the sphere of Latin influence, eventually resulting in the possible extinction of the
Daco-Thracian language, but traces of it are still preserved in the
Eastern Romance substratum. From the 2nd century AD, the Latin spoken in the Danubian provinces starts to display its own distinctive features, separate from the rest of the
Romance languages, including those of the western Balkans (
Dalmatian). The
Thraco-Roman period of the language is usually delimited between the 2nd century (or earlier via cultural influence and economic ties) and the 6th or the 7th century. It is divided, in turn, into two periods, with the division falling roughly in the 3rd to 4th century. The
Romanian Academy considers the 5th century as the latest time that the differences between Balkan Latin and western Latin could have appeared, and that between the 5th and 8th centuries, the new language, Romanian, switched from Latin speech, to a vernacular Romance idiom, called . The nature of the contact between Latin and the substrate language(s) is considered to be similar to the contact with local languages in other parts incorporated in the Roman Empire and the number of
lexical and
morpho-syntactic elements retained from the substrate is relatively small despite some ongoing contact with languages closely related to the original substrate,
Albanian for example. In the ninth century, Proto-Romanian already had a structure very distinct from the other Romance languages, with major differences in grammar, morphology and phonology and already was a member of the
Balkan language area. It already contained around a hundred loans
from Slavic languages, including words such as (body, flesh), as well as some Greek language loans via
Vulgar Latin, but no Hungarian and Turkish words, as these peoples had yet to arrive in the region. In the tenth century or some earlier time, Common Romanian split into two geographically separated groups. One was in the northern part of the
Balkan peninsula and the other one was in the south of the peninsula where the
Aromanian branch of Common Romanian presumably was spoken. This is sometimes considered the upper end of the language, leading into the separate
Eastern Romance languages period. A different view holds that Common Romanian, despite the early split of Aromanian, continued to exist until the thirteenth or fourteenth century when all the southern dialects became distinct from the northern one. According to the theory, it evolved into the following modern languages and their dialects: •
Romanian language (sometimes called
Daco-Romanian to distinguish it from the rest of the
Eastern Romance languages) •
Aromanian (sometimes called Macedo-Romanian) •
Megleno-Romanian (also sometimes called Macedo-Romanian) •
Istro-Romanian == Early attestation ==