ROMANIAN
Excerpts from Wikipedia.org
The Romanians (dated: Rumanians or Roumanians; Romanian: români or historically and today rather seldom and only regional, rumâni) are an ethnic group; they are the majority inhabitants of Romania. In one prominent interpretation of the census results in Moldova, Moldovans are counted as Romanians, which would mean that the latter form the majority in that country as well. Romanians are also an ethnic minority in several nearby countries.
Ancestry
More than 85 percent of Romania's people are Romanians by ancestry. The Romanians are descended from the Dacians, (Daco-Getic, Thracian),Romans
Some recent genetic studies reveal that the ethnic contribution of the indigenous Thracian and Daco-Getic population have indeed made a significant contribution to the genes of the modern Romanian population and to the contribution to other Balkan (Albanians, Greeks) and Italian groups.
Haplogroup J is mostly found in South-East Europe, especially in central and southern Italy, Greece and Romania. It is also common in France, and in the Middle East. It is related to the Ancient Romans, Greeks and Phoenicians (J2), as well as the Arabs and Jews (J1). Subclades J2a and J2a1b1 are found mostly in Greece, Anatolia and southern Italy, and are associated with the Ancient Greeks.
Origin of the Romanians
The Romanians (also sometimes referred to along with other Balkan Latin peoples as Vlachs) are a people speaking Romanian, a Romance language, and living in Central and Eastern Europe. The Origin of the Romanians has been for a long time disputed and there are two basic theories:
- Daco-Romanian continuity in Dacia and some adjacent regions.
- Migration of Romanic peoples from former Roman provinces south of the Danube in the Balkans (The Rösler Theory).
The exact region where the Romanian language and people formed is not only a scientific puzzle, but also a heated political controversy. 19th-century Hungarian historians largely supported the migration theory, which maintained that Transylvania was not inhabited by Romanians at the time of the Magyar conquests in central Europe during the 10th century. Most Romanian historians support the theory of Daco-Romanian continuity and maintain that Transylvania was continuously inhabited by the ancestors of Romanians. The debate was politically charged in the 19th-20th centuries because of territorial conflicts concerning Transylvania between Romania and Hungary.
More recently, as former axioms of ethnogenesis have shifted, the historian Walter Pohl noted that "centuries after the fall of the Balkan provinces, a pastoral Latin-Roman tradition served as the point of departure for a Valachian-Roman ethnogenesis. This kind of virtuality — ethnicity as hidden potential that comes to the fore under certain historical circumstances — is indicative of our new understanding of ethnic processes. In this light, the passionate discussion for or against Roman-Romanian continuity has been misled by a conception of ethnicity that is far too inflexible."
Romanian Diaspora
"Romanian diaspora" is a term that encompasses the total ethnic Romanian population located outside Romania. The term does not usually count those ethnic Romanians living as natives in the states surrounding Romania, chiefly those Romanians living in Moldova, Ukraine and Serbia. The numbers of the diaspora also counts people of Romanian ancestry born in the respective country. The number of all Romanians abroad is estimated at about 4-12 million people, depending on one's definition of the term "Romanian".
In 2006, the Romanian diaspora was estimated at about 8 million people by the president of Romania, Traian Băsescu, most of them living in the former USSR, Western Europe (esp. Spain and France, see Romanian-French), North America, South America and Australia. It is unclear if Băsescu included the Romanians living in the immediate surroundings of the Romanian state. It is also unclear if Băsescu counted Jewish-Romanians, ethnic Hungarians who are native to Northern Romania, also known as Csángó or Szeklers and Transylvanian Saxons of ethnic German origins as Romanians when he made his estimate, as well as third-generation individuals in the United States and Canada.
There are ethnic Romanians in Turkey, both in Asian and European parts of the country, descendants of Walachian settlers invited by the Ottoman Empire from the early 14th to the late 19th centuries. Over 100,000 ethnic Romanians are living throughout far eastern Russia, thousands of Moldovan-Romanians in villages of the Amur River (黑龍江) valley in the Chinese Manchurian side of that river, and about 2,000 Romanian immigrants in Japan since the late 20th century.
Amur River (黑龍江)
