Romanian is the easternmost major Romance language, descended from the Latin of Roman colonists who settled the province of Dacia — present-day Romania — after Emperor Trajan's conquest in 106 CE. Unlike the other Romance languages, Romanian developed in relative isolation east of the Carpathians, surrounded by Slavic, Turkic, and Greek-speaking populations, which led to substantial borrowing from those languages and some unique structural features not found elsewhere in the Romance family. The withdrawal of Roman administration in 271 CE did not extinguish Latin speech among the Dacian-Roman population, and it evolved continuously through the medieval period. Romanian was first attested in writing in 1521 in the Neacșu Letter, the oldest surviving document written in the language. A major wave of re-Latinization in the 18th and 19th centuries deliberately replaced many Slavic loanwords with Latin and French borrowings, giving modern Romanian a more visibly Latin vocabulary than it had centuries earlier.
