Sources
Where each piece of data comes from, and who did the work before us.
Lexical data
The official export dataset of the Romanian dictionary database. It supplies the 2,273,343 inflected forms that make lemmatisation possible and the second etymological verdict for 14,550 words. Redistributed dexonline data remain under GNU GPL v2 or later. Copyright © 2004–2026 dexonline. Definition texts are not redistributed.
The Romanian etymology categories and the articles the chains are read from. Content under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Corpora
The dated prose, 1825–1949. Texts under free licences or in the public domain.
41,357 articles used as a sample of encyclopedic prose. CC BY-SA 4.0.
OpenSubtitles, via Hermit Dave's frequency lists
The 2018 OpenSubtitles list: 306,494,203 words of Romanian-subtitled film dialogue; a proxy for cinematic dialogue, not recorded conversation.
Authors' birth and death years, used to date the texts. CC0.
Contemporary hypotheses and their debate
Dan Alexe, De-a dacii și romanii
Humanitas, 2023. Proposes that Romanian formed in the central Balkans through prolonged structural contact with Albanian and South Slavic. The book supplies an interpretation, not the percentages measured on this site.
Dan Ungureanu, Istoria limbii române
Cartier, 2024. Links a cluster of Romanian innovations to north-western Italy and places Romanian's later emergence in Romania continua, probably the Balkans. Official preview.
Dan Ungureanu, Româna și dialectele italiene
Editura Academiei Române, 2016. The author's presentation of the comparison with dialects from western Lombardy and the Alps.
Dan Alexe, Câteva considerațiuni despre Istoria limbii române a lui Dan Ungureanu
A 2024 text explaining why Alexe considers the two hypotheses incompatible and criticising the priority given to lexical resemblance.
Ioana Vintilă-Rădulescu, «Noutăți» despre «Româna și dialectele italiene»?
Studii și cercetări lingvistice, 69/1, 2018, pp. 105–158. An extensive critical review of the 2016 volume.
Rudolf Windisch, review of Istoria limbii române
Zeitschrift für Balkanologie, 60/2, 2024, pp. 271–286. A detailed assessment favourable to the author's mapping method.
Alexandru Nicolae, public critique of both hypotheses
HotNews interview, 3 November 2024. A critical position on the limits of verification and the conversion of uncertainty into certainty.
Bibliography
Marius Sala, De la latină la română
Univers Enciclopedic, 1998. The book that explains, for a reader who is not a linguist, why counting words in the dictionary and counting words in text give different answers.
Marius Sala (ed.), Vocabularul reprezentativ al limbilor romanice
Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, 1988. The method for computing etymological weight over a representative vocabulary, of which the measurements here are a corpus-based variant.
Alexandru Ciorănescu, Dicționarul etimologic al limbii române
Romanian edition, Saeculum, 2001. One of the etymological sources aggregated by dexonline.
Alexandru Rosetti, Istoria limbii române
Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, 1986. The reference for the older strata, from the substrate to Slavic influence.
Victor A. Friedman and Brian D. Joseph, The Balkan Languages
Cambridge University Press, 2025. A survey of Balkan language contact and the role of Church Slavonic as a written language in the Romanian-speaking lands. Open-access edition.
Alexandru Graur, Încercare asupra fondului principal lexical al limbii române
Editura Academiei, 1954. The first systematic demonstration, in Romanian, that the most-used core of the language is overwhelmingly Latin, however much the borrowings weigh in the dictionary.
Acknowledgements
This page would not exist without the dexonline volunteers, who digitised the Romanian dictionaries, and the Wikisource contributors, who transcribed nineteenth-century prose page by page.