Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first written record of the Romanian language was created in the year 587 when a Vlach muleteer shouted Torna, torna, fratre to his companion. This phrase was recorded by the historian Theophanes Confessor and marks the earliest known instance of a Romance language spoken north of the Danube.
The oldest surviving document written in the Romanian language is Neacșu's letter, dated the 2nd of June 1521. This letter was written using the Cyrillic alphabet and sent by Neacșu of Câmpulung to the mayor of Brașov regarding an imminent Turkish attack.
The Latin alphabet became official in Wallachia in 1860 and in Moldova in 1862, replacing the Cyrillic script that had been used for centuries. The current orthography regulated by the Romanian Academy was fully implemented in 1881.
The Romanian language is unique among Romance languages because it features a suffixed definite article attached to the end of the noun and has preserved only three cases from the original six Latin cases. It also shares specific grammatical features with other Balkan languages such as the syncretism of the genitive and dative case.
Romanian is spoken by 25 million people as a first language, accounting for 0.5 percent of the world's population and 4 percent of the Romance-speaking population. Large immigrant communities are found in Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal, with significant populations in the United States, Canada, and Australia.
The Romanian alphabet is a unique blend of the Latin script with five additional letters: ă, â, î, ș, and ț. The letters K, Q, W, and Y were officially introduced in 1982 and are mostly used to write loanwords like kilogram, quasar, watt, and yoga.