Dacian | |
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Native to | Dacia, whose land corresponded with modern-day Romania, northern Bulgaria, eastern Serbia; Moldova, southwestern Ukraine, southeastern Slovakia, southern Poland, northeastern Hungary |
Ethnicity | Dacians |
Extinct | 6th century AD[1] |
Indo-European
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Latin, Greek (limited use) | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | xdc |
xdc | |
Glottolog | daci1234 |
Part of a series on |
Indo-European topics |
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Dacian (/ˈdeɪʃən/) is an extinct language generally believed to be a member of the Indo-European language family that was spoken in the ancient region of Dacia.
While there is general agreement among scholars that Dacian was an Indo-European language, there are divergent opinions about its place within the IE family:
The Dacian language is poorly documented. Unlike Phrygian, which is documented by c. 200 inscriptions, only one Dacian inscription is believed to have survived.[10][11] The Dacian names for a number of medicinal plants and herbs may survive in ancient literary texts,[12][13] including about 60 plant-names in Dioscorides.[14] About 1,150 personal names[11][15] and 900 toponyms may also be of Dacian origin.[11] A few hundred words in modern Romanian and Albanian may have originated in ancient Balkan languages such as Dacian (see List of Romanian words of possible Dacian origin). Linguists have reconstructed about 100 Dacian words from placenames using established techniques of comparative linguistics, although only 20–25 such reconstructions had achieved wide acceptance by 1982.[16]