The Slavic influence on Romanian language is noticeable on all linguistic levels: lexis, phonetics, morphology and syntax. The intercultural process also enriched the Slavic languages, which borrowed Vulgar Latin words and terms from Romanian, a Romance language, as, for example, 'ciumă' (from Latin cyma=bump, swelling), plague, which became 'čuma' in some Slavic languages. Overview Romanian (or Daco-Romanian), Aromanian (or Macedo-Romanian), Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian form the Balkan Romance branch of the Romance languages. The four languages are descended from a common ancestor developed from the Vulgar Latin spoken in southeastern Europe during Classical Antiquity. The general view is that the territory where the language formed was a large one, consisting of both the north and the south of the Danube (encompassing the regions of Dacia, Moesia, and possibly Illyria), more precisely to the north of the Jiriček Line Proto-Slavicthe root from which the modern Slavic languages developedemerged during the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. The Early Slavs lived in the plains north of the Carpathian Mountains or along the middle course of the Dnieper River. Their expansion accelerated after the fall of the Hunnic Empire in the middle of the 5th century AD. Significant Slavic-speaking groups moved across the Lower Danube and settled in the Balkan Peninsula. By the end of the 7th century, Slavic became the dominant language throughout most of the Balkans. Studies of the South Slavic languages revealed that Bulgarian and Serbian developed for centuries in two distant territories, separated by significant non-Slavic groups. It is unclear when contact began among the Early Slavs and speakers of Common Romanian. According to one scholarly theory, the Romance-speaking communities had already come into contact with the Slavs in the 5th or 6th centuries. To explain the lack of early Slav loanwords in Romanian, linguist Kim Schulte claims that the "contact situation can be assumed to have been one of cohabitation and regular interaction between Romanians and Slavs, without a great degree of cultural dominance of either of the two". In contrast, linguist Gottfried Schramm proposes that the Romanians' ancestors lived in the mountains, surrounded by Albanian-speaking communities and thus separated from the Slavs of the lowlands until the 10th century. Otherwise, he continues, the fact that Slavic loanwords appeared in Albanian earlier than in Romanian could hardly be explained. Contacts with Slavic-speaking groups intensified before the disintegration of Common Romanian and about 80 Slavic loanwords are still present