Flemish plain and the Walloon plateau were long separated by the forests of Hainaut and Brabant, but the clearing of those forests in the Middle Ages, mainly by people spreading down from the plateau, extended the area of Gallic speech and reduced the chances of development of a real linguistic unity in the Flemish fringe. Flanders in consequence suffers from disparity of dialects, and French has been widely used as a language of civilization. With the rise of the nationalist sentiment (see p. 98) in modern times, a severe reaction against the dominance of French has set in, and now threatens the very existence of the Belgian kingdom. A part of the département du Nord, in France, speaks Flemish, but French has long been gaining ground slightly on Flemish in France and probably in Belgium too, in spite of a modern spread of Flemish workpeople into the French speaking area. East of Switzerland the great Alpine barrier between the Roman bank of the Danube and the real Latin areas brought it to pass that the pagani near the Danube were not fully Romanized, and made the whole region fall linguistically to the invading languages, German and Magyar, but a small island of Ladin, a collective name for several ancient dialects, still persists around Cortina and in the upper Grodenthal. The allied Frioul (with more Italian admixture) is spoken in eastern Venetia, and Romansch, also related, in the south of Grisons, East Switzerland. The main boundary between Romance and Germanic is, as usual, not along a main watershed. The watershed, which is pierced by the Brenner Pass, has German spoken on both sides, and the agency town on its south side (Bozen) is still German in language, though strategic considerations have made the victors move the new bounds of Italy right up to the Brenner. A curious result of language changes is observable in Rumania. {24} The Roman frontier province of Dacia was strongly occupied for a time (A.D. 107-255), and the Low-Latin element must have had a marked cultural superiority over the indigenous migratory shepherds. They imposed their language, and the Transylvanian mountains have assisted its survival ever since, but it has survived only thanks to large borrowings which have made its vocabulary three-fifths Slav. In spite of military pressure from time to time, the people of this hill knot have followed the usual rule for people so situated, and have spread downhill, giving an area of modified Romance language from the Dniester almost to the Tisa (Theiss) and from Bukovina to the Balkan Danube. This area was, however, seriously isolated from the other Romance regions after A.D. 270, and it naturally received Christianity from Constantinople, so that it has come to be distinct (p. 79) religiously from the other areas of Romance speech, which are the stronghold of the Roman Catholic Church.