Language Diversity - Language Diversity - Map of Minorities & Regional and Minority Languages of Europe for and about linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe.

Language

Romanian (+Moldovan, Beas) (limba română (+ limba moldovenească, Beas))

Description

Romanian is a language that belongs to the Italic-Romance branch of the Indo-European languages. It is part of the sub-group of the Eastern Romance languages. Romanian is the official language in Romania (19.2 millio speakers) and Moldova (2.8 million speakers, i.e. 64.5% of the population), where it is also called Moldovan. In Hungary (25,000 speakers), Romania is recognised as a minority language.

The Romanian language essentially came into existance once the autochthonous Dacians started to speak Vulgar Latin after their region was conquered by Roman Emperor Trajan (106 AD).

Romanian has a very long history of contacts to the Slavic languages and consists for about 10% of absorbed Slavic words.

Important Words

Hello - salut

Cheers - noroc

You are not alone - NU EŞTI SINGUR

Special

Until 1862 Romanian was written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The so-called Transylvanian School developed the Latin alphabet that is still being used nowadays, including the five special letters: ă, â, î, ș, ț.

Language families

  1. Indo-European
  2. Italic
  3. Romance
  4. Eastern Romance
  5. Romanian (+Moldovan, Beas)

Countries (Official language)

Moldova (2.796.000 Speaker)
Romania (19.159.400 Speaker)