page_title: Dacian language
section_title: Dacia and Moesia: zone of toponyms ending in -dava
hierarchical_section_title: Dacian language / Geographical extent / Dacian linguistic zone in the early Roman imperial era (30 BC – AD 100) / Dacia and Moesia: zone of toponyms ending in -dava
caption_attribution_description: English: Onomastic range of the Dacian towns with the dava ending, covering Dacia, Moesia, Thrace and Dalmatia Română: Teritoriul onomastic al elementului dava, acoperind Dacia, Moesia, Tracia şi Dalmaţia
context_page_description: Dacian is an extinct language, generally believed to be Indo-European, that was spoken in the Carpathian region in antiquity.
  In the 1st century, it was probably the predominant language of the ancient regions of Dacia and Moesia and possibly of some surrounding regions.
  The language was probably extinct by the 7th century AD.
  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:
  Dacian was a dialect of the extinct Thracian language, or vice versa, e. g. Baldi and Trask.
  Dacian was a language distinct from Thracian but closely related to it, belonging to the same branch of the Indo-European family.
  Dacian, Thracian, the Baltic languages formed a distinct branch of Indo-European, e.g. Schall, Duridanov, Radulescu and Mayer.
  The theory of Georgiev Daco-Moesian was the ancestor of Albanian, belonging to a branch other than Thracian, but closely related to Thracian and distinct from Illyrian.
  The Dacian language is poorly documented. Unlike for Phrygian, which is documented by c. 200 inscriptions, only one Dacian inscription is believed to have survived.
context_section_description: At the start of the Roman imperial era (30 BC), the Dacian language was probably predominant in the ancient regions of Dacia and Moesia (although these regions probably contained several enclaves of Celtic and Germanic speakers). Strabo's statement that the Moesian people spoke the same language as the Dacians and Getae is consistent with the distribution of placenames, attested in Ptolemy's Geographia, which carry the Dacian suffix -dava ("town" or "fort").
  North of the Danube, the dava-zone is largely consistent with Ptolemy's definition of Dacia's borders (III.8.1–3) i.e. the area contained by the river Ister (Danube) to the south, the river Thibiscum (Timiș) to the west, the upper river Tyras (Dniester) to the north and the river Hierasus (Siret) to the east. To the west, it appears that the -dava placenames in Olteanu's map lie within the line of the Timiş, extended northwards. However, four davas are located beyond the Siret, Ptolemy's eastern border. But three of these, Piroboridava, Tamasidava and Zargidava, are described by Ptolemy as pará (Gr."very close") to the Siret: Piroboridava, the only one securely located, was 3 km from the Siret. The location of Clepidava is uncertain: Olteanu locates it in north-east Bessarabia, but Georgiev places it further west, in south-west Ukraine, between the upper reaches of the Siret and Dniester rivers.
  South of the Danube, a dialect of Dacian called Daco-Moesian was probably predominant in the region known to the Romans as Moesia, which was divided by them into the Roman provinces of Moesia Superior (roughly modern Serbia) and Moesia Inferior (modern northern Bulgaria as far as the Balkan range plus Roman Dobruja region). This is evidenced by the distribution of -dava placenames, which occur in the eastern half of Moesia Superior and all over Inferior. These regions were inhabited predominantly by tribes believed to have been Dacian-speaking, such as the Triballi, Moesi and Getae.
  However, the dava-zone was not exclusively or uniformly Dacian-speaking during historical times. Significant Celtic elements survived there into the 2nd century AD: Ptolemy (III.8.3) lists two Celtic peoples, the Taurisci and Anartes, as resident in the northernmost part of Dacia, in the northern Carpathians. The partly Celtic Bastarnae are also attested in this region in literature and the archaeological record during the 1st century BC; they probably remained in the 1st century AD, according to Batty.
caption: Map of the geographical distribution of attested placenames with the -dava suffix, covering Dacia, Moesia, Thrace and Dalmatia, according to Olteanu (2010). The dava distribution confirms Dacia and Moesia as the zone of Dacian speech. The dava zone is, with few exceptions, consistent with Ptolemy's definition of Dacia's borders. There is no conclusive evidence that Dacian was a predominant language outside the dava zone in the 1st century AD. According to Strabo, the Thracians spoke the same language as the Dacians, in which case Dacian was spoken as far as the Aegean sea and the Bosporus. But Strabo's view is controversial among modern linguists: dava placenames are absent south of the Balkan mountains, with one exception (see Thracian, below)
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