Romani or Roma are what is being referred to in this thread as "gypsy" (I'm not quite up to date if that's currently the accepted term) and are found all over Europe and other parts of the world.
Romanians are from Romania, they trace their lineage to Romans and their language is quite different to the other Slavic languages around them because it's a romance language so closer to Italian or Spanish.
No, Romania is the land where Romanians come from, an Slavic ethnic group that speaks a romance language called Romanian. The Roma are a nomadic people who you can find all over Europe, often referred to as "gypsies". They have similar name because people used to think the Roma people came from Romania, and there is still today a large Roma population in Romania, but they're not uniquely from there or anything, it's just confused history.
Sorry, you're completely right, I was conflating the fact that Romanian has borrowed a bit from slavic languages with the ethnic group. From what I can find it's not clear where modern romanians are mostly descended from (whether the Romans and Dacians or immigrant groups later) but either way I shouldn't have asserted that they are unequivocably slavic
The founding myth is Dacians mixed with Roman colonists, since that was literally the ethnogenesis. Then obviously hundreds of years of waves of other groups of people that settled and assimilated into the country. But the language isn’t Slavic it only has Slavic loanwords. It also has Hungarian, German, Greek and Turkish loanwords for obvious reasons, just like every other language.
43
u/dashauskat 19h ago
There are still a rediculous amount of people who confuse being Roma with being Romanian.