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.

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.

Related Topics:
Romania - Moldova - Ukraine - Hungary - Serbia and Montenegro - Bulgaria - Canada - United States - Germany - Israel - Australia - New Zealand

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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.

Related Topics:
Romania - Vojvodina - Serbian

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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.

Related Topics:
Moldova - Moldovan

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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.

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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).

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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".

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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.

Related Topics:
Romance language - Slavonian

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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.

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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"):

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• 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

  is realised as /k/; written before front vowels is realised as /?/. Written , in final position, is palatalized.

• Maramure?ian dialect (Graiul maramure?ean), spoken mainly in Maramure?.
• Transylvanian dialect (Graiul ardealean), spoken mainly in Ardeal.
• Banatian dialect (Graiul b?n??ean), spoken mainly in Banat. Written before front vowels is realised as /?/.
• 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.