Romanian language

Romanian (limba român? IPA {{IPA|/'limba ro'm?n?/}}), the official language of Romania, is an Eastern Romance language. It is spoken natively by about 27 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 Chi?inau and its suburbs has more differences. Two out of three Moldovans consider themselves to be speakers of Romanian rather than Moldovan.

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.

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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; brânz?=cheese; mal=shore; see also: List of Dacian words). Some linguists believe that in fact Albanians are Dacians who were not Romanized, and migrated south.

Related Topics:
Albanian language - List of Dacian words

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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.

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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.

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The languages of this sprachbund belong to distinct branches of the Indo-European languages: Bulgarian and Albanian, and in some cases Greek and Serbian.

Related Topics:
Sprachbund - Greek - Serbian

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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.

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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.

Related Topics:
Church Slavonic - 18th century - Bulgarian - Ukrainian - Serbian

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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 .

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There are some Slavonic influences, both on the phonetic level and on the lexical level—for example Romanian took the Slavonic da for yes.

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Other influences

Even before the 19th century, Romanian came in contact with several other languages. Notable among these are:

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• Greek (for example: folos < ófelos = use; buzunar < buzunára = pocket; proasp?t < prósfatos = fresh)
• Hungarian (for example: ora? < város = town; a cheltui < költeni = to spend; a f?g?dui < fogadni = to promise)
• Turkish (for example: cafea < kahve = coffee; cutie < kuta =box; papuc < papuç = slipper)
• German (for example: cartof < Kartoffel = potato; bere < Bier = beer; ?urub < 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.

Related Topics:
19th century - French - Italian

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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:

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• brother: frate / fratern
• finger: deget / digital
• water: ap? / 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.

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