Re-latinization of Romanian

The re-latinization of Romanian (also known as re-romanization) was the reinforcement of the Romance features of the Romanian language during the 18th and 19th centuries. In this period, Romanian adopted a Latin-based alphabet to replace the Cyrillic script and borrowed many words from French as well as from Latin and Italian, in order to acquire the lexical tools necessary for modernization. This process coined words for recently introduced objects or concepts (neologisms), added Latinate synonyms for some Slavic and other loanwords, and strengthened some Romance syntactic features. Some linguistic researchers emphasize that the use of this term is inappropriate as it conflates the larger process of modernization of the language with the more extreme, and in the end unsuccessful, current of eliminating non-Latin influences, and, secondly, the term's lack of precision is susceptible to lead to confusion as the Latin character of the Romanian language had already been noticed since at least the 15th century. Romanian is a Romance language with about 25 million native speakers. It is the official language of Romania and Moldova and has a co-official status in Vojvodina (in Serbia). Ethnic Romanians also live in Ukraine and Hungary. Significant Romanian diasporas developed in other European countries (especially in Italy and Spain) and in North America, Australia and Israel. Romanian is closely related to three other Balkan Romance languages, Aromanian (or Macedo-Romanian), Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian, all descending from a common Proto-Romanian language. Romanian is divided into two main dialects, with a northern dialect spoken in Moldavia, northern Transylvania, Maramureș and Banat, and a southern dialect in Wallachia, but transitional variants also exist in Oltenia and Transylvania. The origin of the Romanians is still subject to scholarly debates. The core of the debate is the continuous presence of the Romanians in the lands now forming Romania north of the Lower Danube.