The Languages spoken in Romania

Based on the 1991 Constitution of Romania, the official language of the country is Romanian. It is used in official government publications, legal contracts, public education, and advertisements should contain translation of foreign words. The Ministry of Education of Romania established the Romanian Language Institute and together with the Ministry of Affairs’ Department for Romanians Abroad it aims to promote Romanian and provide support to people eager to study the language.

Romanian, also known as Daco-Romanian, is a Romance language and is spoken around the world by about 24 to 28 million people. Romanian speakers can be found in Italy, Israel, Spain, the UK, Portugal, US, Germany, Canada, and France. Aside from Romania, it has also official status in Moldova and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia.

Romanian nouns are modulated by gender (neuter, feminine, and masculine), number (singular and plural), and case (vocative, nominative/accusative, dative/genitive). Romanian is the only Romance language in which definite articles are enclitic. The common word order in sentences is SVO (Subject – Verb – Object). It has 7 vowels – a, e, I, o, u, ə, and ɨ. The Romanian alphabet is based on Latin alphabet plus 5 additional letters; presently it is mostly phonemic. The chief particularities of Romanian over other languages that use the Latin alphabet include: the dialogues identified with quotation dashes; in titles, the only first letter of the first word is capitalized; names of months and days are not capitalized; the quotation marks use the Polish format; and proper quotations that span multiple paragraphs do not start each paragraph with quotation marks.