Romanian

Romanian occupies a strange position on the linguistic map of Europe: it descends from Latin, but it was cut off from its relatives and surrounded by Slavic languages for over a thousand years.

The result is a language where anyone with French or Italian recognises the vocabulary instantly, then walks straight into grammar that resembles nothing else in the Romance family. Apă is water, from aqua; noapte is night, from nox. But the wolf is lupul — the article welded onto the end of the noun rather than standing in front. No other Romance language does that.

For a learner this is the cheapest Romance language if you already have another one, and the most interesting one if you want to see how areal influence actually works on a grammar.

Practically, Romanian opens two countries. Romania and Moldova share the language, and since March 2023 that is also true in law — Moldova renamed its state language from Moldovan to Romanian.

And there is a rarer advantage: Romanian spelling is almost perfectly regular. None of French's silent letters, none of Russian's stress maze. Learn the alphabet and you can read any word.

Romanian is a Latin language raised at the neighbours' house. Its vocabulary feels immediately familiar to anyone with Italian or French, but its grammar is full of things the Romance family does not do: the article welded to the end of the noun, a living vocative, and a way of forming the future borrowed from the Balkans.

The most memorable fact about it is that Romanian and Albanian both put the definite article at the end of the noun, although the two are not closely related. They simply lived next to each other long enough. No example shows more clearly that languages learn from their neighbours and not only from their ancestors.

Grammar is where Romanian leaves its Romance relatives, and there are four large points.

One: the definite article is a suffix. lup wolf becomes lupul; casă house becomes casa. No other Romance language does this. Romanian learnt it from the Balkans, and Albanian and Bulgarian do it too, although the three are not closely related.

Two: nouns still decline. Latin had six cases; the other Romance languages dropped them entirely. Romanian kept a reduced system with three distinct forms, plus a living vocative — you call Ioane! rather than Ion!

Three: three genders, and the neuter is unusual. Neuter nouns behave as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. This is a tidy rule rather than a mess of exceptions.

Four: the subjunctive is used far more widely than in other Romance languages. Where French or Italian uses an infinitive, Romanian generally uses the subjunctive with să. This is another Balkan areal feature, and it is where French speakers most often translate literally and get it wrong.

Reading is the fastest-growing skill in Romanian, especially for anyone with another Romance language.

Start with news. The advantage here is large: Romanian journalism leans on formal vocabulary of French origin, so a French speaker reads headlines almost immediately.

Next comes Romanian Wikipedia, on subjects you already know well.

In literature, Romanian offers a rare advantage to a learner: several major Romanian authors also wrote in French — Eugène Ionesco, Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade. Reading one author across the two languages they themselves used is an unusual experience.

One thing to know while reading: the two vocabulary layers create two distinct voices. Formal writing leans heavily on the French-derived words; speech and folk material keep more of the Slavic ones. The same idea can be said with two words of very different register.

And attend to noun endings: the article lives there, so skimming past the ending loses the definite-versus-indefinite distinction entirely.

Romanian is considerably easier to listen to than French, because the syllables are more distinct and there are no nasal vowels. Beginners are often surprised by how much they catch.

What needs getting used to is the diphthongs ea and oa, which appear constantly and give Romanian its particular music. And a final i barely forms a syllable — which makes words sound shorter than they look on the page.

Work through listening sources in this order. Television news first, for its measured pace and standard pronunciation. Then podcasts, a field that has developed well in Romanian. Film and talk shows last.

A note on Romanian in Moldova: it is the same language, but the accent is recognisably different and everyday speech there carries more Russian loanwords. Listening to both is good ear training.

Romanian music is a good source too, particularly folk music, where the Slavic vocabulary layer appears far more densely than in the language of the press.

Romanians are usually pleased to find a foreigner speaking their language, because it is not common. You will be heard more patiently than when practising a large language.

Three things to do early.

Get the pronoun right. Romanian distinguishes familiar tu from formal dumneavoastră, and the formal form is used far more widely than French vous. With strangers, use the formal one.

Learn the vocative for names. Call out Ioane rather than Ion. It is a small detail, but it shows you are learning Romanian itself rather than extrapolating from Italian.

Practise the subjunctive. This is where French speakers most often go wrong, translating the French infinitive literally where Romanian wants the subjunctive with să. Say vreau să merg, not a word-for-word rendering of je veux aller.

On Moldova: if you are talking with Moldovans, call the language Romanian — that has been its official name since March 2023, and it is what linguists have always said.

Writing Romanian has one technical error common enough to need its own paragraph: writing ș and ț with a cedilla instead of a comma.

The correct characters are ș and ț with a comma below. Many keyboards and fonts produce ş and ţ with a cedilla, which belong to Turkish. They look close but are different code points, and text written with the wrong ones renders badly on some systems. Installing the Romanian keyboard layout is the cleanest fix.

On spelling, the â/î rule is the one to internalise: î at the beginning and end of a word, â in the middle. This rule changed several times during the twentieth century for political reasons, so older texts may differ — that is not a misprint.

On register, formal written Romanian leans heavily on the French-derived layer and uses a great deal of nominalisation. Using Slavic-derived words in administrative prose strikes the wrong note.

And remember that the article lives on the end of the noun, so getting the ending wrong is a grammatical error about definiteness rather than a spelling slip.

A few things are worth knowing when using Romanian.

The formal address is used more widely than you would expect. Dumneavoastră appears in many situations where French moved to tu long ago. When in doubt, use the formal form.

The word dor is part of how Romanians describe themselves. It turns up in poetry, in song, and in the everyday conversation of people working abroad — and the Romanian diaspora is very large.

On Moldova, the naming of the language used to be political. Since March 2023 Moldovan law calls the state language Romanian. Linguists had long treated Moldovan and Romanian as two names for one thing.

The Slavic layer is not something Romanians avoid, but it is worth knowing that the nineteenth century saw a deliberate effort to bring in French words to replace Slavic ones. The consequence is many synonym pairs carrying different social registers.

Romanians often describe themselves as good at managing — the verb a se descurca appears constantly in self-description, and it carries an approving tone.