p were the Magyars, or
Hungarians, constituting 8.4 percent of the population. They were
followed by the Germans with 2 percent of the population. All other
ethnic groups--Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Ukrainians, Russians, Czechs,
Slovaks, Turks, Tatars, Bulgarians, Jews and Gypsies--were simply
listed as "other" and together made up only 1.6 percent of the
population.

The Constitution of 1965 guarantees equal rights to all citizens
regardless of nationality or race and stipulates legal sanctions against
both discrimination and instigation of national or racial animosities.
National minorities are guaranteed the free use of their mother tongue
in education, the communications media, and their dealings with
government authorities and unrestricted perpetuation of their cultural
traditions.

Romanians

The origins of the Romanians and their language have been the subject of
differing interpretations and controversy. Romanians are related to the
Vlachs, a pastoral people speaking a Latin-derived language who are
found in the mountainous regions of northern Greece and southern
Yugoslavia.

According to Romanian tradition, Romanians are the direct descendants of
the Dacians, who inhabited the territory of modern Romania before the
Christian Era. The Dacians were conquered by Roman legions under Emperor
Trajan in A.D. 106 and became romanized during 165 years of Roman
control. When Emperor Aurelian abandoned control of Dacia in 271, in the
face of Gothic invasions, the romanized Dacians sought refuge in the
rugged Carpathian Mountains, where they preserved their Latin language
and culture until more settled conditions allowed them to return to the
plains in the tenth century (see ch. 2).

The period of Roman rule of Dacia is well documented, but the absence of
any firm indication of the presence of a Latin-speaking population in
the territory of contemporary Romania until the tenth century has given
rise to another theory of the origin of Romanians, developed mostly by
Hungarian historians. This theory maintains that the Dacians withdrew
with the Roman legions south of the Danube. There they absorbed elements
of Thracian and Slavic culture, in addition to that of their Roman
rulers. Starting in the tenth century, a people speaking a Romance
language moved northward across the Danube as far as Slovakia and
settled in the area that later became Romania.

The Romanian theory of their origin stresses that a people speaking