Rumanians

(self-designation, români), a nation and the principal population of Rumania, numbering some 18 million persons in 1973 (estimate). Rumanians also live in the USSR (119,000 persons, 1970 census), Yugoslavia (60,000), Hungary (15,000), USA (230,000), Canada (30,000), and several other countries. They speak Rumanian. Most believers among the Rumanians belong to the Orthodox Church; Protestants are found mainly in western Rumania.

The Rumanian people evolved out of the Dacians, Getae, and other tribes who inhabited the area included in the Roman provinces of Dacia and Moesia and who were romanized during the period of Roman domination (A.D. 106–271), as well as out of the free Dacians who were not subjected to romanization. Slavs began to influence the ethnogenesis of the Rumanians in the sixth century. These complex ethnic processes ended at the beginning of the second millennium A.D. with the formation of the Eastern Romance people and language. The first early feudal states on the territory of modern Rumania also date from this period. From the tenth century, Byzantine, Slavic, and later Hungarian sources refer to the Rumanians as Vlachs and Volochs.

The emergence of the Rumanian nation is associated with the disintegration of the feudal system, the rise of capitalist relations, the creation of a common literary language, and the unification of the Rumanian lands into a single state. The formation of the Rumanian bourgeois nation, completed in the second half of the 19th century, was accompanied by the bitter struggle of the Danubian Principalities, aided by Russia, for liberation from Turkish and Hapsburg oppression. The final unification of the Danubian Principalities into a single Rumanian state occurred in 1862.

After the establishment of the people’s democratic system, the Rumanians were consolidated into a socialist nation in the course of socialist transformations in the cities and countryside that stimulated the development of all aspects of the national culture. (For the history, economy, and culture of Rumania seeRUMANIA.)