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The Csángós (Csángók; Ceangăi) are a Hungarian ethnographic group of Roman Catholic faith living mostly in the Romanian region of Moldavia, especially in Bacău County. The region where the Csángós live in Moldavia is known as Csángó Land. Their traditional language, Csángó, an old Hungarian dialect, is currently used by only a minority of the Csángó population group. Some Csángós also live in Transylvania (around the Ghimeș-Palanca Pass and in the so-called Seven Csángó Villages) and in the village of Oituz in Northern Dobruja. It has been suggested that the name Csángó is the present participle of a Hungarian verb csángál meaning "wander, as if going away"; purportedly a reference to sibilation, in the pronunciation of some Hungarian consonants by Csángó people. Alternative explanations include the Hungarian word elcsángált, meaning "wandered away", or the phrase csángatta a harangot "ring the bell". The Finnish researcher Yrjö Wichmann believed that probably the name of ceangău (csángó) did not come from a certain Hungarian tribe, but they were called those Transylvanian Szeklers who moved away from their comrades and settled in areas inhabited by Romanians, where they were, both materially and ideologically influenced by them and even Romanized to a certain level. Ion Podea in the "Monograph of Brașov County" of 1938 mentioned that the ethnonym derives from the verb csángodni or ecsángodni and means "to leave someone or something, to alienate someone or something that has left you". This was used by the Szeklers in the case of other Romanized Szeklers from the Ciuc area. In some Hungarian dialects (the one from Transylvanian Plain and the Upper Tisza) "csángó", "cángó" means "wanderer". In connection with this etymological interpretation, the linguist hu made an analogy between the verb "to wander" with the ethnonyms "kabars" and "khazars", which means the same thing.

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