Substrate in Romanian

The proposed substratal elements in Romanian are mostly lexical items. The process of determining if a word is from the substratum involves comparison to Latin, languages with which Romanian came into contact, or determining if it is an internal construct. If there are no matching results, a comparison to Albanian vocabulary, Thracian remnants or Proto-Indo-European reconstructed words is made.

In addition to vocabulary, some other features of Eastern Romance, such as phonological features and elements of grammar (see Balkan sprachbund) may also be from Paleo-Balkan languages.

Romanian developed from the Common Romanian language, which in turn developed from Vulgar Latin. According to a widely accepted theory, the territory where the language formed was a large one, consisting of both the north and the south of the Danube (encompassing the regions of Dacia, Moesia, and possibly Illyria), more precisely to the north of the Jireček Line. Other scholars place the origin of the Romanian language in the Balkan Peninsula, strictly south of the Danube. The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, published in 2013, came to the conclusion that the "historical, archaeological and linguistic data available do not seem adequate" to determine the territory where the development of the Romanian language began.