Romanian diaspora in the context of "Metropolis of Bessarabia"

Romanian (obsolete spelling: Roumanian; endonym: limba română [ˈlimba roˈmɨnə] , or românește [romɨˈneʃte], lit. 'in Romanian') is the official and main language of Romania and Moldova. Romanian is part of the Eastern Romance sub-branch of Romance languages, a linguistic group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin which separated from the Western Romance languages in the course of the period from the 5th to the 8th centuries. To distinguish it within the Eastern Romance languages, in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. It is also spoken as a minority language by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania (Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia and Ukraine), and by the large Romanian diaspora. In total, it is spoken by 25 million people as a first language.

Romanian was also known as Moldovan in Moldova, although the Constitutional Court of Moldova ruled in 2013 that "the official language of Moldova is Romanian". On 16 March 2023, the Moldovan Parliament approved a law on referring to the national language as Romanian in all legislative texts and the constitution. On 22 March, the president of Moldova, Maia Sandu, promulgated the law.

The Senate (Romanian: Senat) is the upper house in the bicameral Parliament of Romania. It has 136 seats (before the 2016 parliamentary election the total number of elected representatives was 176), to which members are elected by direct popular vote using party-list proportional representation in 43 electoral districts (the 41 counties, the city of Bucharest plus 1 constituency for the Romanians living abroad), to serve four-year terms.

In 2018, over a hundred localities in Moldova and dozens in Romania issued symbolic declarations of unification (Romanian: declarații de unire, sg.: declarație de unire) with the other country. Such declarations were also issued by some Moldovan districts and Romanian counties (which are respectively each country's first-level administrative divisions), members of the Moldovan and Romanian diasporas and other entities.

A movement for the unification of Moldova and Romania exists in both countries. Both share a common Romanian language, an Eastern Orthodox faith and strong cultural and historical connections. Supporters of the movement look back on the union of Bessarabia with Romania on 27 March 1918, Bessarabia being a region corresponding up to a point with modern Moldova. As the regions of Bukovina and Transylvania also united with Romania in 1918, with the three unifications being collectively known as the Great Union (Romanian: Marea Unire) among Romanians, 2018 was a symbolic year for unionists and nationalists, celebrated as the centenary of the Great Union.

Romanians in Germany are one of the sizable communities of the Romanian diaspora in Western Europe. According to German statistics, in 2022, the number of Romanian citizens in Germany was 883,670. The number of people with Romanian ancestry in 2022 (defined as all persons who migrated to the present area of the Federal Republic of Germany after 1949, plus all foreign nationals born in Germany and all persons born in Germany as German nationals with at least one parent who migrated to Germany or was born in Germany as a foreign national) was 1,096,000.