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Transylvania (Romanian: Transilvania [transilˈvani.a] or Ardeal; or Hungarian: Erdély; German: Siebenbürgen [ˌziːbm̩ˈbʏʁɡn̩] ⓘ or Transsilvanien, historically Überwald; Transylvanian Saxon: Siweberjen) is a historical and cultural region in Central Europe, encompassing central Romania.
While Romanian is the only official language at the national and local level, there are over 30 living languages identified as being spoken within Romania (5 of these are indigenous). [7] The Romanian laws include linguistic rights for all minority groups that form over 20% of a locality's population based on the census from 1992.
Classifications made until the late 19th century included a Transylvanian dialect, [1] but as soon as detailed language facts became available, in the early 20th century, that view was abandoned. In 1908, Gustav Weigand used phonetic differences and reached the conclusion that the Romanian in Transylvania was a mosaic of transition varieties. [2]
Transylvania, as a part of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary during the early 12th century. The Hungarian tribes originated in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains and arrived in the territory formed by present-day Romania during the 9th century from Etelköz or Atelkuzu (roughly the space occupied by the present day Southern Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova and the Romanian province of Moldavia).
The 2021 Romanian census (postponed one year to 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania) reported a smaller overall figure for the German minority in Romania and, most probably, an even fewer number of native Transylvanian Saxon speakers still living in Transylvania.
Over half of the Roma (approx. 61%) speak Romanian as their native language, the rest (around 8-9%) speaking the Hungarian language. [76] Both the Roma and the Romanian languages are of the Indo-European language family, while the Hungarian is a Uralic one.
The Romanian dialects (Romanian: subdialecte or graiuri) are the several regional varieties of the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian).The dialects are divided into two types, northern and southern, but further subdivisions are less clear, so the number of dialects varies between two and occasionally twenty.
"Romania" derives from the local name for Romanian (Romanian: român), which in turn derives from Latin romanus, meaning "Roman" or "of Rome". [11] This ethnonym for Romanians is first attested in the 16th century by Italian humanists travelling in Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia.