Inherited from Latin rōmānus. Variant of român. As this now obsolete form of the word was mostly used before the language's orthographic reform and shifting of script to the current Latin-based one, it would have been represented mostly with the old Romanian Cyrillic alphabet. The sense of "serf" or "peasant" arose in what is now southern Romania as many of the common people came to be tied to the land as part of a feudal system. [1]
Compare Aromanian armãn, Istro-Romanian rumăr, Albanian rëmër (“Wallachian; shepard”). Compare also the designations of some other Romance speakers for their languages, such as Romansch rumantsch, Old French romanz, as well as Ladin ladin, Ladino ladino. The Romanian word also has a neological doublet, roman, which was borrowed later.
rumân m (plural rumâni)
While this form is now rarely if at all in use in Romania (some older dictionaries mention a few regional dialects using it), some Vlach communities in eastern and northern Serbia still use it to describe themselves, along with some derived adjectives and adverbs.