A few days ago, while I scrubbed my scalp in the shower, I started thinking about the Romanian language. I thought about the way it sounded when I heard a Romanian woman speaking on the phone in a hostel in Istanbul. For several minutes I sat in my bed trying to concentrate on the book I was reading but I was constantly distracted by the voice just outside my door. “Is that Portuguese?” I wondered. I took a year of Portuguese in college, and the language I was hearing had some recognizable words as well as the nasal inflections characteristic of Portuguese. But I kept shaking my head. Something wasn’t quite right.
Romanian is one of the five main Romance languages, alongside Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French. You can hear and see the common Latin roots in each of these languages. I thought about this as I continued to lather. I also thought about, geographically, where the speakers of Romance languages ended up, and how Romanians seemed to be the odd ducks. Everyone else moved west from Rome, while the Romanians went east. And not just a little east. The other four homes of Romance languages are connected geographically – Italy borders France, which borders Spain, which borders Portugal. But Romania doesn’t touch any of those countries. In fact, it’s got a bunch of Slavic speakers between it and its nearest brother, Italy.
So how did Romanians end up so far from their linguistic siblings? And how did they manage to keep their language in the process? I asked myself these questions as I rinsed off. What I should have done, once the Romanian woman hung up and introduced herself and told me where she was from, was ask her to shed some light on her country’s history for me. But I didn’t think of doing that, so now I’ll have to spend some time on Wikipedia solving this mystery.
