Romanian language

Romanian (limba română IPA ) is the fifth of the Romance languages in terms of number of speakers. It is spoken as a first language by somewhere around 24 to 26 million people, and enjoys official status in Romania, Moldova and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (Serbia). The official form of the Moldovan language in the Republic of Moldova is identical to the official form of Romanian save for a minor rule in spelling. Romanian is also an official or administrative language in various communities and organisations (such as the Latin Union and the European Union – the latter as of 2007).

Romanian speakers are also found abroad in many other countries (due to emigration), notably in Italy, Spain, the United States, Canada, France and Germany (cf. Romanians). Owing to a general lack of consistently-derived data, precise estimates for the total numbers of Romanian-speaking emigrants are not available. Some secondary sources claim for example that more than 3 million Romanian speakers live abroad as immigrants in Europe and North America,"Milioane de români pe drumul emigrarii" ("Millions of Romanians on the road of emigration"). Evenimentul Zilei, May 10, 2004. Page is on Internet Archive, retrieved Oct 25, 2004., while however such census data as is available indicates these numbers may be overestimates.

The Romanian language is sometimes nicknamed Limba lui Eminescu after Mihai Eminescu, a famous Romanian poet, who had an important influence in shaping the modern Romanian language.

Romanian is an archaic form of Romance. It is the only language which has retained the neuter and at least a partial declension from Latin.

History

The Romanian territory was inhabited in ancient times by the Dacians, an Indo-European people. They were defeated by the Roman Empire in 106 and part of Dacia (Oltenia, Banat and Transylvania) became a Roman province. For the next 165 years, there is evidence of considerable Roman colonization in the area, the region being in close communication with the rest of the Roman empire. Vulgar Latin became the language of the administration and commerce.

Under the pressure of the Free Dacians and of the Goths, the Roman administration and legions were withdrawn from Dacia between 271-275. Whether the Romanians are the descendants of these people that abandoned the area and settled south of Danube or of the people that remained in Dacia is a matter of debate. For further discussion, see Origin of Romanians.

Due to its geographical isolation, Romanian was probably the first language that split and until the modern age was not influenced by other Romance languages, which can explain why it is one of the most uniform languages in Europe. It is more conservative than other Romance languages in nominal morphology. Romanian has preserved declension, but whereas Latin had six cases, Romanian has three, the nominative/accusative, the genitive/dative, and the vocative, and retains the neuter gender as well. However, the verbal morphology of Romanian has shown the same move towards a compound perfect and future tense as the other Romance languages.

All the dialects of Romanian are believed to have been unified in a Common Romanian language until sometime between the 7th and the 10th century when the area was influenced by the Byzantine Empire and Romanian became influenced by the Slavonic languages. Aromanian language has very few Slavonic words. Also, the variations in the Daco-Romanian dialect (spoken throughout Romania and Moldova) are very small. The use of this uniform Daco-Romanian dialect extends well beyond the borders of the Romanian state: a Romanian-speaker from Moldova speaks the same language as a Romanian-speaker from the Serbian Banat, indicating a relatively recent migration to the northern territories.

Romanian developed in isolation with regard to the other Romance languages. Therefore, it was influenced by Slavonic (due to migration/assimilation, and feudal/ecclesiastical relations), Greek (Byzantine, then Phanariote), Turkish, and Hungarian, while the other Romance languages adopted words and features of Germanic.

Classification and related languages

Romanian is a Romance language, belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family, having much in common with languages such as French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

However, the languages closest to Romanian are the other Eastern Romance languages, spoken south of Danube: Aromanian/Macedo-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian, which are sometimes classified as dialects of Romanian. An alternative name for Romanian used by linguists to disambiguate with the other Eastern Romance languages is "Daco-Romanian", referring to the area where it is spoken (which corresponds roughly to the onetime Roman province of Dacia).

The Romanian variety spoken in Moldova has been named Moldovan language by the Soviet and later Moldovan authorities, but linguists do not recognize it as a different language.

Out of the main Romance languages, Romanian is closest to Italian, the two being mutually intelligible to some extent, especially in their cultivated forms. However, compared to Italian, Romanian sounds considerably softer and less emphatic (rather like Portuguese compared to Spanish). Even though Romanian has obvious lexical and grammatical similarities with French, Catalan, Spanish or Portuguese, it is not mutually intelligible with them to a practical extent; Romanian speakers will usually need some formal study of basic grammar and vocabulary, before being able to understand even the simplest sentences in those languages (and vice-versa).

In the following sample sentence (meaning "She always closes the window before having dinner.") cognates are written in bold:

Ea închide întodeauna fereastra înainte de a cina. (Romanian)

Ella (or lei) chiude sempre la finestra prima di cenare. (Italian)

Elle ferme toujours la fenêtre avant de dîner. (French)

Ella siempre cierra la ventana antes de cenar. (Spanish)

Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de cear. (Portuguese)

On the other hand, Romanian vocabulary has been strongly influenced by French and Italian in the Modern Age (see #French, Italian and other international words). At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 77%, whereas French follows at 75%, Spanish at 71% and Portuguese at 72%.

Geographic distribution

national | official | national minority | minority

¹ Many are Moldovans who were deported
² Data only for the districts on the right bank of Dniester (without Transnistria and the city of Tighina)
In Moldova, it is called "Moldovan language"
³ Transnistria's independence is not internationally recognized
Here it is called "Moldovan language" and it is written in Cyrillic
⁴ Officially divided into Vlachs and Romanians
⁵ Most in Northern Bukovina and Southern Bessarabia; according to a Moldova Noastra study (based on the latest Ukrainian census); the study also says that there are 409,000 ethnic Romanians in Ukraine. ^*
⁶ See Romanian-American

**Romanian language countries and territories**
Country	Speakers (%)	Speakers (native)	Population (2005)
Asia
not official:
Israel	3.7%	250,000	6,800,000
Kazakhstan ¹	0.1%	20,054	14,953,126
Russia ¹	0.12%	178,000	145,537,200
Europe
Romania	91%	19,736,517	21,698,181
Moldova ²	78.2%	2,649,477	3,388,071
Transnistria ³	31.9%	177,050	555,500
Vojvodina (Serbia)	1.5%	29,512	2,031,992
not official:
Timocka Krajina (Serbia) ⁴	5.9%	42,075	712,050
Ukraine ⁵	0.8%	327,703	48,457,000
Hungary	0.08%	8,482	10,198,315
Italy	0.43%	248,849	58,462,375
The Americas
not official:
Canada	0.2%	60,520	32,207,113
United States ⁶	0.11%	340,000	281,421,906

Romanian is spoken mostly in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, but there are also Romanian language speakers in countries like Canada, United States, Germany, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, mainly due to post-World War II emigration. A further surge in emigration to the Western countries occurred following the collapse of the Communist Bloc in 1989, as well as to other Latin countries such as Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal.

Legal status in Romania

Per the Constitution of Romania of 1991, as revised in 2003, Romanian is the official language of the Republic.Constitution of Romania

Romania mandates the use of Romanian in official government publications, public education and legal contracts; advertisements must bear a translation of foreign words.

Institutul Limbii Române, established by the Ministry of Education of Romania, promotes the knowledge of the Romanian language and supports people willing to learn this language, working together with the MFA's Department for Romanians Abroad.Ministry of Education of Romania

There exist in addition to Romanian a variety of languages spoken in Romania by minorities; see Languages of Romania.

Legal status in Moldova

About 10% of the world's Roumanophones are Moldovan, and Romanian is the single official language of Moldova. In the Constitution, the language is officially named Moldovan, although most linguists consider it virtually the same as the Romanian language. Also, the language used in schools, media, scientific environment and in the colloquial speech and writing is called Romanian.

Romanian has been the only official language of Moldova since the endorsement of the law on language of the Moldavian SSR. This law, still in force today, mandates the use of Moldovan in all the political, economical, cultural and social spheres, as it also does assert the real existence of "linguistic Moldo-Romanian identity". Legea cu privire la functionarea limbilor vorbite pe teritoriul RSS Moldovenesti Nr.3465-XI din 01.09.89 Vestile nr.9/217, 1989 (Law regarding the usage of languages spoken on the territory of the Republic of Moldova): "Moldavian RSS supports the desire of the Moldovans that live across the borders of the Republic, and considering the really existing linguistical Moldo-Romanian identity - of the Romanians that live on the territory of the USSR, of doing their studies and satisfying their cultural needs in their maternal language."

Title I, Article 13 of the Moldovan Constitution, names it the "national language" (limba de stat) of the country. In the unrecognized state of Transnistria, it is co-official with Ukrainian and Russian.

In the 2004 census, out of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova, 16.5% (558,508) chose Romanian as their mother tongue, whereas 60% chose Moldovan. While 40% of all urban Romanian/Moldovan speakers chose Romanian as their mother tongue, in the country side hardly each 7th Romanian/Moldovan speaker indicated Romanian as his mother tongue.National Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Moldova: Census 2004 However, the group of experts from the international census observation Mission to the Republic of Moldova concluded that the items in the questionnaire dealing with nationality and language proved to be the most sensitive ones, particularly with reference to the recording of responses to these questions as being "Moldovan" or "Romanian", and therefore it concluded that special care would need to be taken in using them.Experts Offering to Consult the National Statistics Bureau in Evaluation of the Census Data, Moldova Azi, May 19, 2005, story attributed to AP Flux. Retrieved October 11, 2005.

Legal status in Vojvodina

Article 8 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia (published in the Official Gazette of RS", No. 1/90) stipulates that in the Republic of Serbia the Serbo-Croat language and the Cyrillic script shall be officially used, while the Latin script shall be officially used in the manner established by the law. In addition to that, the provision in Article 8/2 precisely determines that in the regions of the Republic of Serbia inhabited by national minorities, their own languages and scripts shall be officially used as well, in the manner established by law.

Article 6 of the Statute of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (published in the "Official Gazette of APV") determines that, together with the Serbo-Croat language and the Cyrillic script, and the Latin script as stipulated by the law, the Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Ruthenian languages and their scripts, as well as languages and scripts of other nationalities, shall simultaneously be officially used in the work of the bodies of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, in the manner established by the law. The bodies of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina are: the Assembly, the Executive Council and the Provincial administrative bodies.Official use of languages and scripts in the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina published by the Provincial Secretariat for Regulations, Administration and National Minorities

The Romanian language and script are officially used in 8 municipalities: Alibunar, Biserica Albă, Zitişte, Zrenianin, Kovăciţa, Cuvin, Plandişte and Secanj. In the municipality of Vârşeţ, Romanian is official only in the villages of Vojvodinci, Markovac, Straža, Mali Žam, Malo Središte, Mesić, Jablanka, Sočica, Ritiševo, Orešac and Kuštilj.Provincial Secretariat for Regulations, Administration and National Minorities: Official use of the Romanian language in the APV

In the 2002 Census, the last carried out in Serbia, 1,5% Vojvodinians chose Romanian as their mother tongue (barely 0,1% of the world's Roumanophones).

Legal status in other countries and organisations

In other parts of Serbia the Romanian communities have very few rights regarding the use and preservation of their language in schools, press, administration and institutions.

In parts of Ukraine where Romanians consitute a significant share of the local population (districts in Chernivtsi, Odessa and Zakarpattia oblasts) the Romanian language is being taught in schools as a primary language and there are newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting in Romanian.Ukrainian Center for Independent Political Research: [http://www.ucipr.kiev.ua/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3377&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0Slovak Academy of Sciences in Kosice The University of Chernivtsi trains the teachers for the Romanian schools in the fields of Romanian philology, mathematics and physics.University of Chernivtsi

Romanian is also an official or administrative language in various communities and organisations (such as the Latin Union and the European Union - the last as of 2007).

Romanian is one of the five languages in which religious services are performed in the autonomous monastic state of Mount Athos, spoken in the sketae of Prodromos and Lacu (a sketa being a community of monks; sketae is plural).

Romanian as second and foreign language

Use of Romanian as a second language is recorded among many of the ethnic minorities in Romania, as well as Moldova. According to a 1979 census in the Moldova SSR (as it was then), approximately 4% of the population indicated Romanian/Moldovan as their second language Language, religion and culture in the Moldavian SSR.

Romanian is studied and taught in some areas that have Romanian minority communities, such as Serbia (Vojvodina), Bulgaria, Ukraine and Hungary. The Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) has since 1992 organised summer training courses in Romanian for language teachers in these countries.Cursuri de perfecţionare, published in Ziua on August 19, 2005 In some of the schools, there are non-Romanian nationals, that study Romanian as a foreign language (for example the Nicolae Bălcescu High-school in Gyula, Hungary).

Romanian is taught as a foreign language in various Tertiary institutions, most prevalently in neighboring European countries (such as Germany, France and Italy, as well as the Netherlands) but also elsewhere, such as the USA. Overall, it is taught as a foreign language in 38 countries around the world.Romanian Language Institute: Data concerning the teaching of the Romanian language abroad

Dialects and regional varieties

The term "Romanian" in a general sense envelops four hardly mutually intelligible speech varieties commonly regarded as independent languages. For more on these, please see the article "Eastern Romance languages".

It is thought that the Romanian language appeared north and south of the Danube. All the four dialects are offsprings of the Romance language spoken both in the North and South Danube, before the settlement of the Slavonian tribes south of the river - Daco-Romanian in the North, and the other three dialects in the south.

However, this article deals primarily with Daco-Romanian, and thus the regional variations of that will be discussed here instead. The differences between these varieties are usually very small, usually consisting in a few dozen regional words and some phonetic changes.

Like all other languages, Romanian can be regarded as a dialect continuum. However, such a formulation tends to obscure the high homogeneity and uniformity of the language. The Romanian language cannot be neatly divided into separate dialects and Romanians themselves speak of the differences as accents or "speeches" (in Romanian: "accent" or "grai"). This correctly conveys the linguistics notion of accent, as language variants that only feature slight pronunciation differences (Romanian accents are fully mutually intelligible). Several accents are usually distinguished:

Muntenian accent (Graiul muntenesc), spoken mainly in Wallachia and southern parts of Dobruja.
Moldavian accent (Graiul moldovenesc), spoken mainly in Moldavia, northern parts of Dobruja and the Republic of Moldova. Written
is realised as /k/; written before front vowels is realised as . Written <ă>, in final position, is palatalized.
Maramureşian accent (Graiul maramureşean), spoken mainly in Maramureş.
Transylvanian accent (Graiul ardealean), spoken mainly in Ardeal.
Banatian accent (Graiul bănăţean), spoken mainly in Banat. Written before front vowels is realised as .
Oltenian accent (Graiul oltenesc), spoken mainly in Oltenia and by the Romanian minority in Timok region of Serbia. Notable feature of this dialect is the usage of the Simple perfect tense rather than the Complex perfect which is used in other dialects.

Over the last century, however, regional accents have been weakened due to mass communications and greater mobility.

Contacts with other languages

Dacian language

The Dacian language was an Indo-European language spoken by the ancient Dacians. It may have been the first language to influence the Latin spoken in Dacia, but there is very little knowledge about it. About 300 words found only in Romanian (in all dialects) or with a cognate in the Albanian language may be inherited from Dacian, many of them being related to pastoral life (for example: balaur=dragon; brânză=cheese; mal=shore; see: Eastern Romance substratum). Some linguists have asserted that Albanians are Dacians who were not Romanized, and migrated south.

A different view is that these non-Latin words (many with Albanian cognates) are not necessarily Dacian, but rather were brought into the territory that is modern Romania by Romance-speaking shepherds migrating north from Albania, Serbia, and northern Greece who became the Romanian people. However, the Eastern Romance substratum appears to have been a satem language, while the Paleo-Balkan languages spoken in Northern Greece (Ancient Macedonian language) and Albania (Illyrian language) were most likely centum languages.

The general view is that Dacian was a satem language, as was Thracian. Dacian was either close to the neighboring Albanian or Balto-Slavic branches of Indo-European, or a member of a distinct branch.

Balkan linguistic union

While most parts of the Romanian grammar and morphology are based on Vulgar Latin, there are however some features that are shared only with other languages of the Balkans and cannot be found in other Romance languages.

The languages of this sprachbund belong to distinct branches of the Indo-European languages: Bulgarian and Albanian, and in some cases Greek and Serbian.

Among the shared features, there are the postponed definite article, the syncretism of genitive and dative cases, the formation of the future and perfect tenses, as well as the avoidance of infinitive.

Slavic languages

The Slavic influence was first due to the migration of Slavic tribes, which traversed the territory of today's Romania during the formation of the language. It is interesting to note that Slavs were assimilated north of Danube, whereas they almost completely assimilated the Romanized population (Vlachs) living south of Danube. An important part of this population was still Vlach in the 10th century, only to fade away along with Vlach political power. For more information about this, see Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian. The other surrounding languages (all Slavic, with the exception of Hungarian) also influenced Romanian, through centuries of mutual interactions.

Of great importance was the influence of Old Church Slavonic, as it was the liturgical language of the Romanian Orthodox Church (compared to western and central European countries which used Latin) from the Middle Ages, until the 18th century.

Borrowings from Old Church Slavonic: a izbavi from Sl. izbaviti=to save; a blagoslovi from Sl. blagosloviti=to bless; blajin from Sl. blažĕnŭ=mercifull, peacefull; cinste from Sl. čĩştĩ=honesty; isprava from Sl. isprava= deed, accomplishment; vrednic from Sl. vrĕdĩnŭ=dignified, worthy; jertfa from Sl. žrŭtyva=sacrifice, immolation; mir from Sl. miro=chrism, holy oil;

As characteristic of the Middle Ages, the Church had a great influence on peoples lifes. Thus, even basic words such as: a iubi=to love; glas=voice; nevoie=need; prieten=friend are of Church Slavonic origin; Names were also influenced by the use of Slavonic in Church and in administration.

However, many Slavic words are archaisms and it is estimated that from the 20% of Slavic borrowings, only 10% of these words in modern Romanian are in use^*.

There are some Slavonic influences, both on the phonetic level and on the lexical level—for example Romanian took the Slavonic da for yes.

Other influences

Even before the 19th century, Romanian came in contact with several other languages. Notable among these are:

Greek (for example: folos < ófelos = use; buzunar < buzunára = pocket; proaspăt < prósfatos = fresh)
Hungarian (for example: oraş < város = town; a cheltui < költeni = to spend; a făgădui < fogadni = to promise; a mântui < menteni = to save)
Turkish (for example: cafea < kahve = coffee; cutie < kutu = box; papuc < papuç = slipper; ciorbă < çorba = soup)
German (for example: cartof < Kartoffel = potato; bere < Bier = beer; şurub < Schraube = screw)

French, Italian and other international words

Since the 19th century, many modern words were borrowed from the other Romance languages, especially from French and Italian (for example: birou < bureau = desk, office; avion = airplane; exploata = exploit, etc). It was estimated that about 38% of the number of words in Romanian are of French or Italian origin and adding this to the words that were inherited from Latin, it makes about 75-85% of the Romanian words that can be traced to Latin.

However, many of these Latin words had entered Romanian already, first as part of its core or popular vocabulary, and later as a more literary international borrowing. Typically, the popular word is a noun and the borrowed word an adjective. Some examples:

brother: frate / fratern
finger: deget / digital
water: apă / acvatic
cold: frig / frigid
eye: ochi / ocular
dust: pulbere / pulverizat
liquid: licoare / lichior (from French liqueur)
tooth: dinte / dentist
fat: gras / cras (from French crasse, meaning crass)
land: ţărână / teren (from French terrain)
grave: mormânt / monument (from French monument)
anger: mâníe / manie (meaning mania via French manie)
patch (fabric): petic / patch (software; via English patch)

Recently, an increasing number of English words have been borrowed (such as: gem < jam; interviu < interview; meci < match; manager < manager; fotbal < football). These words are assigned grammatical gender in Romanian and handled according to Romanian rules; thus "the manager" is managerul.

Grammar

Romanian nouns are inflected by gender (feminine, masculine and neuter), number (singular and plural) and case (nominative/accusative, dative/genitive and vocative). The articles, as well as most adjectives and pronouns, agree in gender with the noun they reference.

Romanian is the only Romance language where definite articles are enclitic: that is, attached to the end of the noun (as in North Germanic languages), instead of in front (proclitic). They were formed, as in other Romance languages, from the Latin demonstrative pronouns.

Romanian has four verbal conjugations which further split into ten conjugation patterns. Verbs can be put in five moods that are inflected according to the person (indicative, conditional/optative, imperative, subjunctive, and presumptive) and four impersonal moods (infinitive, gerund, supine, and participle).

Phonology

Romanian has seven vowels: , , , , , , and . Additionally, and may appear in some words.

In final positions after consonants (rarely inside words) a short non-syllabic can occur, which is marked in IPA by and is produced as a palatalization of the preceding consonant. A similar sound, the voiceless ending u, existed in old Romanian but has disappeared from the standard language.

There are also four semivowels and twenty consonants.

Diphthongs

Descending diphthongs: ai, au, ei, eu, ii, iu, oi, ou, ui, ăi, ău, îi, îu.

Ascending diphthongs: ea, eo, ia, ie, io, iu, oa, ua, uă.

Triphthongs

Pattern S-V-S (main vowel between two semivowels): eai, eau, iai, iau, iei, ieu, ioi, iou, oai.

Pattern S-S-V (two-semivowel glide before the main vowel): eoa, ioa.

Phonetic changes

Due to its isolation from the other Romance languages, the phonetic evolution of Romanian was quite different, but does share a few changes with Italian, such as > Dalmatian, such as ^*" target="_blank" >> [mn (Lat. cognatus > Rom. cumnat, Dalm. comnut).

Among the notable phonetic changes are:

diphthongization of e and o
Lat. cera > Rom. ceară (wax)
Lat. sole > Rom. soare (sun)
iotacism → [ie in the beginning of the word
Lat. herba > Rom. iarbă (grass, herb)
velar ^*," target="_blank" >^* before alveolar consonants:
Lat. octo > Rom. opt (eight)
Lat. quattuor > Rom. patru (four)
Lat. lingua > Rom. limbă (tongue, language)
Lat. signum > Rom. semn (sign)
Lat. coxa > Rom. coapsă (thigh)
rotacism → [r between vowels
Lat. caelum > Rom. cer (sky)
Alveolars and ^*/^*" target="_blank" >and ^*" target="_blank" >or long [i
Lat. deus > Rom. zeu (god)
Lat. tenem > Rom. ţine (hold)

On the other hand, it (along with French) has lost the /kw/ (qu) sound from original Latin, turning it either into p (patru, "four"; cf. It. quattro) or a hard or soft c (când, "when"; calitate, "quality").

Writing system

The first written record of a Romanic language spoken in the Middle Ages in the Balkans was written by the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes Confessor in the 6th century about a military expedition against the Avars from 587, when a Vlach muleteer accompanying the Byzantine army noticed that the load was falling from one of the animals and shouted to a companion "Torna, torna fratre" (meaning "Return, return brother!").

The oldest written text in Romanian is a letter from late June 1521, in which Neacşu of Câmpulung wrote to the mayor of Braşov about an imminent attack of the Turks. It was written using the Cyrillic alphabet, like most early Romanian writings. The earliest writing in Latin script was a late 16th century Transylvanian text which was written with the Hungarian alphabet conventions.

In the late 1700s, Transylvanian scholars noted the Latin origin of Romanian and adapted the Latin alphabet to the Romanian language, using some rules from Italian, recognized as Romanian's closest relative. The Cyrillic alphabet remained in (gradually decreasing) use until 1860, when Romanian writing was first officially regulated.

In the Soviet Republic of Moldova, a special version of the Cyrillic alphabet derived from the Russian version was used, until 1989, when it returned to the Romanian Latin alphabet.

Romanian alphabet

The Romanian alphabet is as follows:

A, a (a); Ă, ă (ă); Â, â (â din a); B, b (be), C, c (ce); D, d (de), E, e (e); F, f (fe / ef); G, g (ghe / ge); H, h (ha / haş); I, i (i); Î, î (î din i); J, j (je), K, k (ka de la kilogram), L, l (le / el); M, m (me / em); N, n (ne / en); O, o (o); P, p (pe); R, r, (re / er); S, s (se / es); (e); T, t (te); (e); U, u (u); V, v (ve); X, x (ics); Z, z (ze / zet).

The Romanian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, and has five additional letters (these are not diacriticals, but letters in their own right). Initially, there were as many as 12 additional letters, but some of them disappeared in subsequent reforms. Also, until the early 20th century, a short vowel marker was used.

Today, the Romanian alphabet is largely phonetic. However, the "â" (used inside the words) and "î" (used at the beginning or the end) both represent the same close central unrounded vowel , which is a slack sound somewhere between "i" in English "bit" and "oo" in English "food".

Until 1904 there were four letters representing the sound: â, ê, î and û. By the middle of the century, through successive simplifications, only â and î remained in use. A further simplification was mandated in 1953 whereby î would be used exclusively, including in such words as România (new spelling: Romînia) or limba română (now spelt romînă) For this reason, the spelling reform was perceived as an attempt of the new pro-Soviet government to delete the Romanians' national identity. In 1965, exceptions were made for România and the other related words; these would continue to be spelled with â.

In 1993 the Romanian Academy decided to fully revert to the pre-1953 spelling rules, on the grounds that the 1953 reform was forcibly imposed by the Communists. According to the current usage accepted by the Romanian Academy, is transcribed as either î when used as the first or last letter of words, or â when it occurs in the middle of the word (exception: î occurs also in the middle of composite words; example: bineînţeles, reînvestire). However this move was met with resistance, especially in the linguist community. The Academy rules are mandatory in government organisations and in state schools. In practice, either usage is acceptable, and indeed there are publishing houses and printed magazines who use either of the two rules.

Another exception from a completely phonetic writing system is the fact that vowels and their respective semivowels are not distinguished in writing. In dictionaries the distinction is marked by separating the entry word into syllables for the words containing a hiatus that might be mispronounced as a diphthong or a triphthong.

Stressed vowels also are not marked in writing, except very rarely in cases where by misplacing the stress a word might change its meaning. For example "trei copíi" means three children while "trei cópii" means three copies.

Q, W and Y are not part of the core Romanian alphabet; they are used mainly to write imported words, such as quasar, watt, and yoga.

Writing the letters Ș () and Ț () with a cedilla instead of a comma (i.e., Ş, Ţ) is rather widespread, especially in computer environments. The Romanian Academy has declared it incorrect.

Reading rules

Reading Romanian involves learning a few rules, quite similar to reading Italian.

h represents

j represents

There are two letters with a comma below, and , which represent the sounds and . However, the allographs with a cedilla instead of a comma, Ş and Ţ, became widespread when pre-Unicode and early Unicode character sets did not include the standard form.

A final orthographical i after a consonant often represents the palatalization of the consonant (e. g. lup "wolf" vs. lupi "wolves").

ă represents the schwa, .

The letter e is generally pronounced as the diphthong ie when it is in the beginning of a form of the verb a fi "to be", e. g. este "is". This rule also applies to personal pronouns beginning with e, e. g. el "he".

x represents either the phoneme as in expresie = expression, or as in exemplu = example.

Similarly to the reading rules in Italian, the letters c and g represent the affricates and before i and e, and and elsewhere. When and are followed by vowels and (or their corresponding semivowels or the final ) the digraphs ch and gh are used instead of c and g, as shown in the table below.

Group	Pronunciation	Examples
ce, ci	ch in chest, cheek	cerc (circle), cine (who)
che, chi	k in kettle, kiss	chem (I call), chimie (chemistry)
ge, gi	j in jelly, jigsaw	ger (frost), gimnast (gymnast)
ghe, ghi	g in get, give	gheţar (glacier), ghid (guide)

Punctuation and Capitalization

The only particularities Romanian has relative to other languages using the Latin alphabet are:

The quotation marks use the German format;
Dialogues are identified with quotation dashes;
Proper quotations which span multiple paragraphs don't start each paragraph with the quotation marks; one single pair of quotation marks is always used, regardless of how many paragraphs are quoted;
The Oxford comma before "and" is considered incorrect ("red, yellow and blue" is the proper format);
Punctuation signs which follow a text in parentheses always follow the final bracket;
In titles, only the first letter of the first word is capitalized, the rest of the title using sentence capitalization (with all its rules: proper names are capitalized as usual, etc.).

Exceptions and trends

Dialogues are identified with quotation dashes in everyday use, although the specific character is typically replaced with an ordinary dash ("-") in informal electronic communication.

Usage of German quotation marks has decreased considerably in favor of the much more convenient English-language format, at least in informal messages. Even in writing, because of the awkwardness of properly drawing German dashes (reversing the direction of writing upwards for the final quotation symbol), the proper format is rarely used, typically using the Polish format instead, if any attempt at proper formatting is done. In practice, only the most formal documents, such as literary works or very formal letters, use what are formally considered the proper form of quotation marks.

Language sample

English text:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

(Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Contemporary Romanian - highlighted words are French or Italian loanwords:

Toate fiinţele umane se nasc libere şi egale în demnitate şi în drepturi. Ele sunt înzestrate cu raţiune şi conştiinţă şi trebuie să se comporte unele faţă de altele în spiritul fraternităţii.

Romanian, excluding French or Italian loanwords - highlighted words are Slavic loanwords:

Toate fiinţele omeneşti se nasc slobode şi deopotrivă în destoinicie şi în drepturi. Ele sunt înzestrate cu cuget şi înţelegere şi trebuie să se poarte unele faţă de altele după firea frăţiei.

Romanian, excluding loanwords:

Toate fiinţele omeneşti se nasc nesupuse şi asemenea în preţuire şi în drepturi. Ele sunt înzestrate cu cuget şi înţelegere şi se cuvine să se poarte unele faţă de altele după firea frăţiei.

Common words and phrases

English	Romanian	Phonetical transcription
Romanian (person)	(m.) român, (f.) româncă	,
Hello!	Salut!
What's your name?	Cum te cheamă?
How are you?	Ce mai faci?
Goodbye!	La revedere!
Bye!	Pa!
Please.	Vă rog.
Sorry.	Îmi pare rău.
Thank you.	Mulţumesc.
Yes.	Da.
No.	Nu.
I don't understand.	Nu înţeleg.
Where's the bathroom?	Unde e toaleta?
Do you speak English?	Vorbiţi engleza?

Notes

References

Rosetti, Alexandru, Istoria limbii române, 2 vols., Bucharest, 1965-1969.
Uwe, Hinrichs, Handbuch der Südosteuropa-Linguistik

External links

Learning Romanian

Phrasebooks

Dictionaries

Miscellaneous

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