Romanian is a neo-Latin language of Dacian-Romance-Slavic origin. Romanians from the Balkans speak various dialects of Romanian. Some groups within the Romanian community communicate in Hungarian, Gypsy, Serbian, German and Greek, in accordance with their ethnic backgrounds. 

The origins and structure of the Latin language, as it was spoken by the ancient Romans, relate to the Romanian language, and as it provides a basis for understanding the other Romance languages. 

The Romance languages are a group of closely related vernaculars descended from the Latin Language, a member of the Italic branch of Indo-European Languages. The designation Romance is derived from the Latin phrase romanica loqui, "to speak in Roman fashion," which attests to the popular, rather than literary, origins of the languages. 

Romanian has broken into several dialects, such as Macedo-Romanian, spoken in southern Macedonia, and Isto-Romanian, the language of a few thousand people in northwestern Croatia. The dialect of Bucharest serves as the standard language. 

There are similarities between the Latin and the Romanian alphabet and grammatical paradigms, but also distinctions. The Romanian alphabet has four extra letters, its pronunciation follows no set pattern, its distinctions in gender are more easily evident in the Romanian, its reflexive pronouns are extremely complex, and numerous verbs are irregular. 

At the time when the Daco-Roman ethno-cultural symbiosis was achieved and finalized in the 6-7th centuries by the formation of the Romanian people, in the 2-4th centuries, the Daco-Romans adopted Christianity in a Latin garb. 

The Romanian language has more then 80% vocabulary based on Latin words and the Christianity had left obvious proofs starting with 3rd century. Still, the Romanian language itself, contains 3.800 words of Slavic origin, as well as hundreds of words of Albanian origin. Romanian is also similar to Albanian morphology and phonology and includes derivatives of Albanian words that denote body parts, kinship, plants and animals and, most significantly, shepherd words. 

The Slavs, who massively settled since the 7th century south of the Danube, split the compact mass of Romanians in the Carpathian-Danubian area: the ones to the north (the Daco-Romanians) were separated from the ones to the south, who were moved towards the west and Southeast of the Balkan Peninsula (Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians and Istro-Romanians). The Slavs that settled north of the Danube were assimilated little by little by the Romanian people and their language left traces in the vocabulary and phonetics of the Romanian language. To the Romanian language, the Slavic language (similarly to the Germanic idiom of the Franks with the French people) was the so-called super-imposed layer.

The Romanians belonged to the Orthodox religion so they adopted the Old Church Slavic as a cult language, and, beginning with the 14-16th centuries, as a chancery and culture language.

Owing to their position, the Romanians south of the Danube were the first to be mentioned in historical sources (the 10th century), under the name of vlahi or blahi (Wallachians); this name shows they were speakers of a Romance language and that the non-Roman peoples around them recognized this fact.