Romanian language Romanian is a Romance language, belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family, having much in common with languages such as French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. However, the languages closest to Romanian are the other Eastern Romance languages, spoken south of the Danube: Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian. An alternative name for Romanian used by linguists to disambiguate with the other Eastern Romance languages is "Daco-Romanian", referring to the area where it is spoken (which corresponds roughly to the onetime Roman province of Dacia). Compared with the other Romance languages, the closest relative of Romanian is Italian; the two
Proto-language system of isoglosses which held together dialects which were spoken by various tribes, from which the historically attested Indo-European languages emerged. Proto-language A proto-language, in the tree model of historical linguistics, is a language, usually hypothetical or reconstructed, and usually unattested, from which a number of attested known languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. In the strict sense, a proto-language is the most recent common ancestor of a language family, immediately before the family started to diverge into the attested "daughter languages". It is therefore equivalent with the "ancestral language" or "parental language" of