Romanian language

Table of contents

1 What is the Romanian language ? 2 Dialects 3 Linguistic Origins 4 Grammar 4.1 Pronouns 4.2 Nouns 4.3 Verbs 5 Written Romanian 5.4 Group of letters 6 Common words and phrases in Romanian 7 External Links

What is the Romanian language ?

Romanian (Română, ISO 639 codes: rum, ron, ro) is an Eastern Romance language, spoken by about 30 million people, most of them in Romania, Moldova (where it is the official language) and neighbouring countries (Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Greece), but there are also Romanian language speakers in countries like Canada, United States, Germany, Israel, Australia and New Zealand.

Dialects

Romanian has four dialects: Daco-Romanian - generally referred as Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Macedoromanian. 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 North, and the other three dialects in the South.

Linguistic Origins

Most words in Romanian vocabulary (about 75%) are of Latin origin, but it also contains many words borrowed from its Slavonic neighbours and also from German, Hungarian, Turkish, French and English.

There are some Slavonic influences, both on the phonetic level and on the lexical level - for example, since Latin does not has a word for yes, Romanian took the Slavonic da. Also Romanian is the only Romance language with /h/. (Although in most dialects of Spanish, <j> is pronounced as [h], but the original, Castilian phoneme is /x/.)

Grammar

Pronouns

As in Italian, pronouns are generally omitted in Romanian unless required to disambiguate the meaning of a sentence. Usually, the verb ending provides information about the subject.

		Singular	Plural
1st Person		eu - I	noi - we
2nd Person	familiar	tu - you	voi - you
	polite	dumneavoastră - you	dumneavoastră - you
3rd Person	familiar	ea - she el - he	ele - they (f) ei - they (m)
	polite	dumneaei - she dumnealui - he	dumnealor - they

Nouns

Unlike the other Romance languages, Romanian has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter, keeping the neuter gender from Latin. Nouns of this gender use the masculine form for the singular and the feminine form for the plural.

Another peculiarity of Romanian is that it is the only Romance language that has the definite article attached to the end of the noun (as in Swedish) instead of being a separate word in front.

Gender	Noun	Definite article	Noun with article
Feminine	carte = book	-a	cartea = the book
Masculine	drum = road	-ul	drumul = the road

Verbs

Romanian has the same four groups of verbs as Latin and unlike English, it has no sequence of tenses nor strict rules regarding their use, but it does have many alternatives (for example, it has six different types of future tense).

Written Romanian

The oldest written text in Romanian is a letter from 1521 ("Neacşu of Câmpulung's letter"). It is written using the Cyrillic alphabet, like all early Romanian writings (because the usual language for religious services was old Slavonian).

In the late 1700s, Transylvanian scholars started using the Latin alphabet to write Romanian. The Cyrillic alphabet remained in (gradually decreasing) use until 1860, when Romanian writing was first officially regulated.

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, with one exception: the "â" (used inside the words) and "î" (used at the beginning or the end), both representing the same sound. Long and short vowels are not distinguished in writing. Usually, the sounds denoted by letters are similar to Italian.

Here are the letters of the Romanian alphabet, and their pronunciation.

Letter	Phoneme	Pronunciation
A a	/a/	Like in 'Mars'
Ă ă (a with breve)	Schwa	first sound of above
 â (a with circumflex)	no English equivalent	ы in Russian, ı in Turkish
B b	/b/
C c	/k/	Like in 'cat'
D d	/d/
E e	/e/	Like in 'merry'
F f	/f/
G g	/g/	Like in 'goat'
H h	/h/	Like in 'house'
I i	/i/	Like in 'machine'
Î î (i with circumflex)	the same as â
J j	/Z/	Like French 'j': 'jour'
K k	/k/
L l	/l/	Like in 'lamp'
M m	/m/
N n	/n/
O o	/o/	Like in 'door'
P p	/p/
R r	/r/	Trilled - like Italian, Spanish 'r'
S s	/s/
Ș ș (s with comma) (also with cedilla: Ş ş)	/S/	like in sheep
T t	/t/
Ț ț (t with comma) (also with cedilla: Ţ ţ)	/ts/	like in nuts
U u	/u/	Like in 'group'
V v	/v/
X x	/ks/
Z z	/z/

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

Writing letters /S/ and /ts/ with a cedilla instead of a comma is incorrect, but widespread, especially in computer environments. The preferred form is with comma below. (Note that not all computer systems can properly render these "comma-below" characters. However, they are included as special Romanian Unicode characters in the Unicode standard.)

There are seven vowels in Romanian:

a e i o u ă î â

The last two letters both represent exactly the same sound, and since they are also not interchangeable in writing this article counts them as a single vowel.

The reason for using both î and â is historical, denoting the language's Latin origin. During Nicolae Ceausescu's regime, the use of  and â was abandoned leaving only the î in use, except in the name of the country which was still România. After his regime ended, the Romanian Academy reintroduced â, but by then most of the population had forgotten how to properly use â, so the Academy proposed an artificial set of rules for the usage of this letter. For instance, the Latin angelus (angel) naturally became the Romanian ânger, but today it is spelled înger.

Common words and phrases in Romanian

The Romanian alphabet is phonetic, so the words are read just nearly as in Italian/Latin (with the exception of the diacrical).

• Romanian (person): "Român"
• hello: "Salut"
• good-bye: "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?"