of the Balkan peninsula (in a large area between the Black Sea and the Adriatic Sea), from which the Daco-Romanian branch of Common Romanian subsequently formed. The other one was in the south of peninsula (Dardania, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace), where the Aromanian branch of Common Romanian presumably was spoken. According to the theory, it evolved into the following modern languages and their dialects: Romanian language (sometimes called Daco-Romanian to distinguish it from the rest of the Eastern Romance languages) Aromanian (sometimes called Macedo-Romanian) Megleno-Romanian Istro-Romanian Contact of Latin with Thraco-Dacian The language or languages spoken by the populations of the Southeastern Europe before the Roman expansion in the region are poorly attested and the relationship between them speculative, therefore linguists mainly use the phrase Thraco-Dacian when pointing the source of substratum words in Daco-Romance languages. The nature of the contact between Latin and the substrate language(s) is considered to be similar to the contact with local languages in other parts incorporated in the Roman Empire resulting in a language shift to Latin and the number of lexical and morpho-syntactic elements retained from the substrate is relatively small despite some ongoing contact with languages closely related to the original substrate, Albanian for example. To differentiate substratum words from borrowings linguists use a process of elimination compared to sieving by linguist Grigore Brâncuș, where after determining that the etymon doesn't belong to Latin and is not a loanword from a language of contact such as Old Church Slavonic, it is compared to Proto-Albanian words or reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words. Due to the poor attestation of the Thraco-Dacian language this comparative method has led to many words of uncertain or disputed origin to be erroneously classified as belonging to substratum in less academic circles. Common features to the four dialects Collectively described as languages of the Daco-Romance subgroup from a synchronic, contemporary perspective Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian are dialects of the same proto-language from a historical, diachronic point of view. Of the features that are found in all four dialects, inherited from Latin or subsequently developed, of particular importance are: appearance of the ă vowel; growth of the plural inflectional ending -uri for the neuter gender; analytic present conditional (ex: Daco-Romanian aș cânta); analytic future with an auxiliary derived from Latin volo (ex: Aromanian va s-cãntu); enclisis of the definite article (ex. Istro-Romanian câre – cârele); nominal declension with two case forms in