Romanian language

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Romanian (română)
Spoken in:	Romania, Moldova, Vojvodina, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Serbia, Hungary, the Balkans, Canada, USA.
Region:	Eastern Europe
Total speakers:	26 million
Ranking:	36
Genetic classification:	Indo-European Italic Romance East Romance (Daco-)Romanian Aromanian Megleno-Romanian Istro-Romanian
Official status
Official language of:	Romania, Moldova ⁽¹⁾, Vojvodina (Serbia and Montenegro)
Regulated by:	Academia Română
Language codes
ISO 639-1	ro
ISO 639-2	rum (B), ron (T)
SIL	RUM
See also: Language – List of languages

Romanian (limba română IPA /'limba ro'mɨnə/), the official language of Romania, is an Eastern Romance language. It is spoken natively by about 24 to 26 million people, most of them in Romania, Moldova and Vojvodina. While the official form of Moldovan is nearly identical to the official form of Romanian, the colloquial speech of Chişinau and its suburbs has more differences. Two out of three Moldovans consider themselves to be speakers of Romanian rather than Moldovan.

History

Image:Romance languages and Romanian.png

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Under the pressure of the Free Dacians and of the Goths, the Roman administration and legions were withdrawn from Dacia between 271-275.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. It is 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, which is quite remarkable. 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.

It is also noteworthy that Romanian was the only Romance language that was not under the cultural influence of the Roman Catholic Church, instead being influenced by the Eastern Orthodox Church, Slavonic, Greek and Turkish cultures.

Contacts with other languages

Dacian language

The Dacian language was an Indo-European language spoken by the ancient Dacians. It was 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 are generally thought to 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 believe that in fact Albanians are Dacians who were not Romanized, and migrated south.

There is another theory that Dacian was fairly close to Latin, originally advanced by linguist Bogdan Petriceicu-Hasdeu. However, there is little support available for this idea, and the general view is that Dacian was close to Albanian or Balto-Slavic.

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 largely based on Church Slavonic, which was a liturgical language until the 18th century, as well as Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Serbian.

Up to 20% of the vocabulary is of Slavic origin, including words such as: a iubi=to love; glas=voice; nevoie=need; prieten=friend; However, many Slavic words are archaisms and it is estimated that only 10% of the words in modern Romanian are Slavic [2].

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)
Turkish (for example: cafea < kahve = coffee; cutie < kuta =box; papuc < papuç = slipper)
German (for example: cartof < Kartoffel = potato; bere < Bier = beer; şurub < Schraube = screw)

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.

Some Latin words have entered Romanian twice, first as part of its core or popular vocabulary and a second time as a more literary international borrowing. Typically, the popular word is a noun and the borrowed word an adjective:

brother: frate / fratern
finger: deget / digital
water: apă / acvatic
cold: frig / frigid
eye: ochi / ocular

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

Geographic distribution

Romanian is spoken mostly in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia and Montenegro, Bulgaria, but there are also Romanian language speakers in countries like Canada, United States, Germany, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, mainly due to immigration after World War II.

**Romanian language countries and territories**
country	speakers </br> (%)	speakers </br>(native)	population </br> (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%	366,100	48,457,000
Hungary	0.08%	8,482	10,198,315
The Americas
not official:
Canada	0.2%	60,520	32,207,113
United States ⁶	0.11%	300,000	281,421,906
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 "Moldavian 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 ⁶ See Romanian-American

Official status

Romanian is the official language of Romania. In Vojvodina it is established as equal in rights to the official languages, but in fact its status is inferior to that of Serbian.

The official language in Moldova is officially called Moldovan, but the official form of this language is identical to Romanian, with some minor differences in spelling.

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

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).

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 variaties are usually very small, usually consisting in a few dozen regional words and some phonetic changes.

Daco-Romanian can be regarded as a dialect continuum and as such, it cannot be neatly divided into separate dialects. However, the Daco-Romanian regional varieties are usually divided roughly into these groups (Romanian "graiuri"):

Muntenian dialect (Graiul muntenesc), spoken mainly in Wallachia and southern parts of Dobruja. Regarded as the standard variety of Romanian.
Moldavian dialect (Graiul moldovenesc), spoken mainly in Moldavia, northern parts of Dobruja and the Republic of Moldova. Written <p> is realised as /k/; written <c> before front vowels is realised as /ʃ/. Written <ă>, in final position, is palatalized.
Maramureşian dialect (Graiul maramureşean), spoken mainly in Maramureş.
Transylvanian dialect (Graiul ardealean), spoken mainly in Ardeal.
Banatian dialect (Graiul bănăţean), spoken mainly in Banat. Written <t> before front vowels is realised as /ʧ/.
Oltenian dialect (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.

Grammar

Main article: Romanian 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 several 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).

Sounds

Main article: Romanian phonology

Romanian has seven vowels: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /ə/, and /ɨ/. Additionally, vowel /ø/ may appear in some words.

In final positions after consonants (rarely inside words) a short non-syllabic /i/ can occur, which is marked in IPA by /ʲ/ 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 [kl] > [kj] (Lat. clarus > Rom. chiar, Ital. chiaro) and also a few with Dalmatian, such as [gn] > [mn] (Lat. cognatus > Rom. cumnat, Dalm. comnut).

Among the notable phonetic changes are:

diphthongization of e, i, o
Lat. cera > Rom. ceară (wax)
Lat. sole > Rom. soare (sun)
iotacism [e] → [i]
Lat. herba > Rom. iarbă (grass, herb)
velar [k], [g] → labial [p], [b], [m]
Lat. octo > Rom. opt (eight)
Lat. lingua > Rom. limbă (tongue, language)
Lat. signum > Rom. semn (sign)
Lat. coxa > Rom. coapsă (thigh)
rotacism [l] → [r]
Lat. caelum > Rom. cer (sky)
Alveolars [d] and [t] palatalized to [dz]/[z] and [ts] when before [e] or [i]
Lat. deus > Rom. zeu (god)
Lat. tenem > Rom. ţine (hold)

Romanian is the only widely-spoken contemporary Romance language that retains the original phoneme /h/. (The Norman language also retains phoneme /h/. In many dialects of Spanish, particularly in the Americas, <j> is pronounced as [h], but this appears not to be a matter of "retention": the original Castilian phoneme is /x/. In some dialects of Portuguese, depending on the surrounding phonemes, <r> is pronounced as [h], but likewise, the original phoneme appears to have been <r>. In these dialects, <r> arguably corresponds to two phonemes, one for [r], and one for [h].)

Writing system

Image:Scrisoarea lui Neacsu.jpg Image:Romanian-kirilitza-tatal-nostru.jpg

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 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 Italian alphabet to the Romanian language. 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

Main article: 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); Ș ș (șe); T, t (te); Ț ț (țe); 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 /ɨ/, which is a slack sound somewhere between "i" in English "bit" and "oo" in English "food". Until 1904 there were four letters representing this sound: â, ê, î and û. During Communist rule in Romania (more precisely between 1953 and 1993) only the letter î was used to transcribe this sound (with a few accepted exceptions). According to the current usage accepted by the Romanian Academy, /ɨ/ 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. In practice, either usage is acceptable and some publications still retain the Communist-era orthography.

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 (/ʃ/) and Ț (/ʦ/) with a cedilla instead of a comma (i.e., Ş, Ţ) is incorrect but rather widespread, especially in computer environments.

Reading rules

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

The letters c and g represent the affricates /ʧ/ and /ʤ/ before i and e, and /k/ and /g/ before a, o, u, ă, and â/î. The digraphs ch and gh before front vowels represent slightly palatalized /k/ and /g/.

h represents /h/

j represents /ʒ/

The letter with comma below, Ș and Ț represent /ʃ/ and /ʦ/, though the allographs with cedilla, 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 represents palatalization of the consonant (e. g. lup /lup/ "wolf" vs. lupi /lupʲ/ "wolves").

ă represents the schwa, /ə/.

Group of letters

Letters c and g have special pronunciation when used in these groups of characters, which are the same as in Italian

Group	Sound	Examples
ce, ci	/tʃ/	ch in chest, cheek
che, chi	/k/	k in kettle, kiss
ge, gi	/dʒ/	j in jelly, jigsaw
ghe, ghi	/g/	g in get, give

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.

See also: Lord's Prayer in Romanian

Common words and phrases

English	Romanian	Phonetical transcription
Romanian (person)	Român	/ro'mɨn/
Hello!	Salut!	/sa'lut/
What's your name?	Cum te cheamă?	/'kum.te.kěa.mə↘/
How are you?	Ce mai faci?	/'ʧe.maǐ.faʧʲ↘/
Goodbye!	La revedere!	/la.re.ve'de.re/
Bye!	Pa!	/pa/
Please.	Vă rog.	/və'rog/
Sorry.	Îmi pare rău.	/ɨmʲ.pa.re'rəǔ↘/
Thank you.	Mulţumesc.	/mul.ʦu'mesc/
Yes.	Da.	/da/
No.	Nu.	/nu/
I don't understand.	Nu înţeleg.	/'nu.ɨn.ʦe.leg↘/
Where's the bathroom?	Unde e toaleta?	/'un.de.ǐe.to.a.le.ta↘/
Do you speak English?	Vorbiţi engleza?	/vor'biʦʲ.eŋ'gle.za↗/

Note

⁽¹⁾ The constitution of the Republic of Moldova refers to the country's language as Moldovan rather than Romanian, though in practice it is often called "Romanian". For more information, please see Moldovan language.

References

¹ Rosetti, Alexandru, Istoria limbii române, 2 vols., Bucharest, 1965-1969.
² Uwe, Hinrichs, Handbuch der Südosteuropa-Linguistik

External links

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Romanian language edition of Wikipedia

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Proto-Romanian language
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Regulating bodies Romanian Academy Academy of Sciences of Moldova

Eastern Romance languages

Proto-Romanian language

Northern

Daco-Romanian (Romanian and Moldovan)
Istro-Romanian

Southern

Aromanian
Megleno-Romanian

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