ROMANIA country of southeastern Europe, surrounded by Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia Ukraine and Hungary. It goes out to the Black Sea. It belongs to the EC. In Romanian it is called Romania. Romania and Moldova are the only Eastern European countries whose languages are Romance. The origin of the term is from the late Latin rumanus, which means belonging to the territory under jurisdiction of the Roman State. The reason for this name is historical. The region was formerly called Dacia. The Dacians caused many problems to Rome from the s. I d . C . and in the s . II the emperor Trajan decided to end the conflicts and carried out campaigns of annexation of these territories, where the peoples spoke Greek. It was placing people who became owners of the lands and who were of Latin origin, from the south of Italy and in a period of 150 years the territory was densely repopulated. In the third century barbarian pressures, especially that of the Goths, made it very difficult to control such extensive territory, and the Romans abandoned control of the Dacian province towards the end of the century. However the inhabitants of the surrounding regions continued to call this Latinized population the Romani, who spoke the language of the Romans and considered themselves Romans. Hence they are called Romanians and the Romance language derived from Latin is called in the same way.
