Dacian Language - The Fate of Dacian

The Fate of Dacian

From the earliest times that they are attested, Dacians lived on both sides of Danube and on both sides of the Carpathians, evidenced by the northern Dacian town Setidava. It is unclear exactly when the Dacian language became extinct, or whether it has a living descendant. The first Roman conquest of part of Dacia did not extinguish the language, as Free Dacian tribes may have continued to speak Dacian in the area north-east of the Carpathians as late as the 6th or 7th century AD. According to one hypothesis, a branch of Dacian continued as the Albanian language (Hasdeu, 1901). Another hypothesis (Marius) considers Albanian to be a Daco-Moesian dialect that split off from Dacian before 300 BC and that Dacian itself became extinct. However, mainstream scholarship considers Albanian to be a descendant of the Illyrian language and not a dialect of Dacian. In this scenario, Albanian/Romanian cognates are either Daco-Moesian loanwords acquired by Albanian, or, more likely, Illyrian loanwords acquired by Romanian.

The argument for a split before 300 BC is that inherited Albanian words (e.g. Alb motër 'sister' < Late IE ma:ter 'mother') show the transformation Late IE /a:/ > Alb /o/, but all the Latin loans in Albanian having an /a:/ show Latin a: > Alb a. This indicates that the transformation PAlb /a:/ > PAlb /o/ happened and ended before the Roman arrival in the Balkans. However, Romanian substratum words shared with Albanian show a Romanian /a/ that corresponds to an Albanian /o/ when the source of both sounds is an original common /a:/ (mazăre / modhull < *ma:dzula 'pea', raţă / rosë < *ra:tya: 'duck'), indicating that when these words had the same common form in Pre-Romanian and Proto-Albanian, the transformation PAlb /a:/ > PAlb /o/ had not yet begun. The correlation between these two theories indicates that the hypothetical split between the pre-Roman Dacians, who were later Romanised, and Proto-Albanian happened before the Romans arrived in the Balkans.