That's the point I'm making - Romani has nothing to do with Romance languages, despite the word looking like it has a similar root, so the argument that Romanian is obviously a Romance language because it looks like it has a similar root doesn't hold
I could be wrong but it's my understanding that Romania was given it's name by its neighbors, after the area was subjugated by Trajean and inhabited by Romans, to mean the land of the Romans or the place where they lived. Then eventually, once the name of the region had been established, the people who were indigenous to Romania (whose ancestors came from Northern India) started to be called Roma (in English they're typically called gypsies), even though their roots were not Roman. They were identified as such by people from other parts of Europe as the Roma are somewhat nomadic and spread out a lot. The majority of people still in Romania still spoke Latin or some derivative.
Some Romani find the word "Gypsy" offensive and racist, while others seem to accept or even use it with no problem. It's probably better if we refer to them as Roma or Romani.
Weird how that works, for me roma(ni) has a more negative connotation than gypsy. Which has a bit of an romantic air around it ( nothing to do with the language, but I mean the adventurous traveling life, living under the open sky)
I think it might be necessary to explain a romanian is NOT the same as a roma(ni) neither are the languages the same. You have got Romania with the langugage romanian. Which is not related to the traveling group sometimes also referred to as gypsies, the romani. Which are indo-aryan origin and so is their language also called romani
fun fact the word gypsies come from egyptian, there were stories that that was were they originated from. (But in fact they originate from india)
btw not only does romania(n) and roma(ni) have nothing to do with eachother. The names also are not related. The name is most likely to come from (sanskriet) doma, “member of a low caste of travelling musicians and dancers”. The dom people are group with which they share similar history.
As a linguistics amateur, I can say that Romanian is a language in the Eastern branch of the Romanic (a.k.a. Romance) language group. But as you can see from a map, it is surrounded by Slavic languages and Hungarian. That means Romanian has been influenced a lot by Slavic languages.
I still remember my high school days in the 1960s of having to learn the Indo-European language families, basically meaning the origin of most of the languages of Europe and parts of Asia. We all hated that unit in English class but it's been more useful to me than I would have ever thought at the time. Romance languages are the branch that developed from Latin, or the regions of the Roman Empire.
This is a somewhat common misperception. Almost no one in the DRC is a native French speaker. Furthermore, according to Wikipedia, only 10% of DRC residents are even "proficient" French speakers.
I thought of French Canadian too, but I don't think it's counted as an actual different language. I think it'd be similarly compared to British English and American English. They may have their dialects within them, but they're both still English. Now Louisiana French Creole would, I think, be counted as a separate language from French, even though it's highly based on it.
What do you mean by "speakers"? I mean, if you mean people who speak the language on a daily basis, certainly the figures are accurate. Yet if you talk about people who can use that language fluently without necessarily using it everyday, I'd say those figures do vary a bit. For example, there are 7 million people in Catalonia only where Catalan, though not used by every single one of them, is widely known and used.
"Native speaker" means that the person speaks that language as their first language, meaning they were raised from birth or very early childhood speaking that language. You can be a native speaker of more than one language (if, say, you were raised in a bi- or multi-lingual household), but any language you learn later is a second language, and you would not be a native speaker of it no matter how fluent you are or how much you use it on a daily basis.
Significantly, while most if not all of their vocabulary comes from the dominant language (say French), the structures are heavily if not exclusively influenced by the other languages (say West African languages, in the case of Haitian). They're usually put in their own category, although you can refer to them as, for example, Romance-lexified.
In addition to English, Spanish, German and Portuguese, we had to learn Latin roots in school. It's amazing how easy it is to figure out a language if you the "root" it originated from.
En realitat en som força més de quatre milions i escaig, que tenim el català de primera llengua. Força, força més. Potser doblem aquesta xifra que només se m'acut que pot sorgir de tenir el dit "valencià" per una altra llengua, quan no n'és pas.
Combining France, Belgium, Québec, Haiti, Switzerland and African countries (yes I know most of them aren't Native speakers, but it's still a considerable number between the +150 million L2 speakers), French should easily surpass 90 or 100 million.
ROMANi...ROMANce. Romani comes from India way
fun fact the word gypsies come from egyptian, there were stories that that was were they originated from. (But in fact they originate from india)
btw not only does romania(n) and roma(ni) have nothing to do with eachother. The names also are not related. The name is most likely to come from (sanskriet) doma, “member of a low caste of travelling musicians and dancers”. The dom people are group with which they share similar history.
http://www.jetpunk.com/user-quizzes/169478/germanic-languages