Romanian (limba română) is the fifth of the Romance languages in terms of number of speakers. It is spoken as a first language by somewhere around 24 to 26 million people, and enjoys official status in Romania, Moldova and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (Serbia and Montenegro). The official form of the Moldovan language [1] in the Republic of Moldova is identical to the official form of Romanian save for a minor rule in spelling. Romanian is also an official or administrative language in various communities and organisations (such as the Latin Union and the European Union – the latter as of 2007).
Romanian speakers are also found abroad in many other countries (due to emigration), notably in Italy, Spain, the United States, Canada, France and Germany (cf. Romanians). Owing to a general lack of consistently-derived data, precise estimates for the total numbers of Romanian-speaking emigrants are not available. Some secondary sources claim for example that more than 3 million Romanian speakers live abroad as immigrants in Europe and North America, while however such census data as is available indicates these numbers may be overestimates.
The Romanian language is often nicknamed Limba lui Eminescu after Mihai Eminescu, the national poet of both Romania and Moldova.
The Romanian territory was inhabited in ancient times by the Dacians, an Indo-European people. They were defeated by the Roman Empire in 106 and part of Dacia (Oltenia, Banat and Transylvania) became a Roman province. For the next 165 years, there is evidence of considerable Roman colonization in the area, the region being in close communication with the rest of the Roman empire. Vulgar Latin became the language of the administration and commerce.
Under the pressure of the Free Dacians and of the Goths, the Roman administration and legions were withdrawn from Dacia between 271-275. Whether the Romanians are the descendants of these people that abandoned the area and settled south of Danube or of the people that remained in Dacia is a matter of debate. For further discussion, see Origin of Romanians.
Due to its geographical isolation, Romanian was probably the first language that split and until the modern age was not influenced by other Romance languages, which can explain why it is one of the most uniform languages in Europe. It is more conservative than other Romance languages in nominal morphology. Romanian has preserved declension, but whereas Latin had six cases, Romanian has three, the nominative/accusative, the genitive/dative, and the vocative, and retains the neuter gender as well. However, the verbal morphology of Romanian has shown the same move towards a compound perfect and future tense as the other Romance languages.
All the dialects of Romanian are believed to have been unified in a Common Romanian language until sometime between the 7th and the 10th century when the area was influenced by the Byzantine Empire and Romanian became influenced by the Slavonic languages. Aromanian language has very few Slavonic words. Also, the variations in the Daco-Romanian dialect (spoken throughout Romania and Moldova) are very small. The use of this uniform Daco-Romanian dialect extends well beyond the borders of the Romanian state: a Romanian-speaker from Moldova speaks the same language as a Romanian-speaker from the Serbian Banat, indicating a relatively recent migration to the northern territories.
Romanian developed in isolation with regard to the other Romance languages. Therefore, it was influenced by Slavonic (due to migration/assimilation, and feudal/ecclesiastical relations), Greek (Byzantine, then Phanariote), Turkish, and Hungarian, while the other Romance languages adopted words and features of Germanic.
Romanian is a Romance language, belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family, having much in common with languages such as French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
However, the languages closest to Romanian are the other Eastern Romance languages, spoken south of Danube: Aromanian/Macedo-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian, which are sometimes classified as dialects of Romanian. An alternate name for Romanian used by linguists to disambiguate with the other Eastern Romance languages is "Daco-Romanian", referring to the area where it is spoken (which corresponds roughly to the onetime Roman province of Dacia).
The Romanian variety spoken in Moldova has been named Moldovan language by the Soviet and later Moldovan authorities, but linguists do not recognize it as a different language.
Out of the main Romance languages, Romanian is closest to Italian, the two being mutually intelligible to some extent, especially in their cultivated forms. However, compared to Italian, Romanian sounds considerably softer and less emphatic (rather like Portuguese compared to Spanish). Even though Romanian has obvious lexical and grammatical similarities with French, Catalan, Spanish or Portuguese, it is not mutually intelligible with them to a practical extent; Romanian speakers will usually need some formal study of basic grammar and vocabulary, before being able to understand even the simplest sentences in those languages (and vice-versa).
On the other hand, Romanian vocabulary was strongly influenced by French and Italian in the Modern Age. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 77%, whereas French follows at 75%.
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 post-World War II emigration. A further surge in emigration to the Western countries occurred following the collapse of the Communist Bloc in 1989, as well as to other Latin countries such as Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal.
Per the Constitution of Romania of 1991, as revised in 2003, Romanian is the official language of the Republic.[3]
Romania mandates the use of Romanian in official government publications, public education and legal contracts; advertisements must bear a translation of foreign words.
Institutul Limbii Române, established by the Ministry of Education of Romania, promotes the knowledge of the Romanian language and supports people willing to learn this language, working together with the MFA's Department for Romanians Abroad.
There exist in addition to Romanian a variety of languages spoken in Romania by minorities; see Languages of Romania.
About 10% of the world's Roumanophones are Moldovan, and Romanian is the single official language of Moldova. In the Constitution, the language is officialy named Moldovan, although most linguists argue on this, and consider it virtually the same as the Romanian language. Also, the language used in schools, media, scientific environment and in the colloquial speech and writing is called Romanian.
Romanian has been the only official language of Moldova since the endorsement of the law on language of the Moldavian SSR. This law, still in force today, mandates the use of Moldovan in all the political, economical, cultural and social spheres, as it also does assert the real existence of "linguistic Moldo-Romanian identity".
Title I, Article 13 of the Moldovan Constitution, names it the "national language" (limba de stat) of the country. In the unrecognized state of Transnistria, it is co-official with Ukrainian and Russian.
In the 2004 census, out of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova, 16.5% (558,508) chose Romanian as their mother tongue, whereas 60% chose Moldovan. But this procent varies from the cities to the country side. Although 40% of all urban Romanian/Moldovan speakers chose Romanian as their mother tongue, in the country side hardly each 7th Romanian/Moldovan speaker indicated Romanian as his mother tongue. However, the group of experts from the international census observation Mission to the Republic of Moldova concluded that the items in the questionnaire dealing with nationality and language proved to be the most sensitive ones, particularly with reference to the recording of responses to these questions as being "Moldovan" or "Romanian", and therefore it concluded that special care would need to be taken in using them.[6]
Article 8 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia (published in the Official Gazette of RS", No. 1/90) stipulates that in the Republic of Serbia the Serbo-Croat language and the Cyrillic script shall be officially used, while the Latin script shall be officially used in the manner established by the law. In addition to that, the provision in Article 8/2 precisely determines that in the regions of the Republic of Serbia inhabited by national minorities, their own languages and scripts shall be officially used as well, in the manner established by law.
Article 6 of the Statute of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (published in the "Official Gazette of APV") determines that, together with the Serbo-Croat language and the Cyrillic script, and the Latin script as stipulated by the law, the Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Ruthenian languages and their scripts, as well as languages and scripts of other nationalities, shall simultaneously be officially used in the work of the bodies of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, in the manner established by the law. The bodies of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina are: the Assembly, the Executive Council and the Provincial administrative bodies.
The Romanian language and script are officially used in 8 municipalities: Alibunar, Biserica Albă, Zitişte, Zrenianin, Kovăciţa, Cuvin, Plandişte and Secanj. In the municipality of Vârşeţ, Romanian is official only in the villages of Vojvodinci, Markovac, Straža, Mali Žam, Malo Središte, Mesić, Jablanka, Sočica, Ritiševo, Orešac and Kuštilj.
In the 2002 Census, the last carried out in Serbia, 1,5% Vojvodinians chose Romanian as their mother tongue (barely 0,1% of the world's Roumanophones).
In other parts of Serbia the Romanian communities have very few rights regarding the use and preservation of their language in schools, press, administration and institutions.[citation needed]
In parts of Ukraine where Romanians consitute a significant share of the local population (districts in Chernivtsi, Odessa and Zakarpattia oblasts) the Romanian language is being taught in schools as a primary language and there are newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting in Romanian.[9][10] The University of Chernivtsi trains the teachers for the Romanian schools in the fields of Romanian philology, mathematics and physics.
Romanian is also an official or administrative language in various communities and organisations (such as the Latin Union and the European Union - the last as of 2007).
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).
Use of Romanian as a second language is recorded among many of the ethnic minorities in Romania, as well as Moldova. According to a 1979 census in the Moldova SSR (as it was then), approximately 4% of the population indicated Romanian/Moldovan as their second language.
Romanian is studied and taught in some areas with Romanian minority communities, such as Serbia (Vojvodina), Bulgaria, Ukraine and Hungary. The Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) has since 1992 organised summer training courses in Romanian for language teachers in these countries.[13] In some of the schools, there are non-Romanian nationals, that study Romanian as a foreign language (for example the Nicolae Bălcescu High-school in Gyula, Hungary).
As a foreign language, Romanian is taught as a foreign language in various Tertiary institutions, most prevalently in neighboring European countries but also elsewhere, overall in 38 countries such as the USA, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and others.
The Dacian language was an Indo-European language spoken by the ancient Dacians. It may have been the first language to influence the Latin spoken in Dacia, but there is very little knowledge about it. About 300 words found only in Romanian (in all dialects) or with a cognate in the Albanian language may be inherited from Dacian, many of them being related to pastoral life (for example: balaur=dragon; brânză=cheese; mal=shore; see: Eastern Romance substratum). Some linguists have asserted that Albanians are Dacians who were not Romanized, and migrated south.
A different view is that these non-Latin words (many with Albanian cognates) are not necessarily Dacian, but rather were brought into the territory that is modern Romania by Romance-speaking shepherds migrating north from Albania, Serbia, and northern Greece who became the Romanian people. However, the Eastern Romance substratum appears to have been a satem language, while the Paleo-Balkan languages spoken in Northern Greece (Ancient Macedonian language) and Albania (Illyrian language) were most likely centum languages.
The general view is that Dacian was a satem language, as was Thracian. Dacian was either close to the neighboring Albanian or Balto-Slavic branches of Indo-European, or a member of a distinct branch.
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.
The languages of this sprachbund belong to distinct branches of the Indo-European languages: Bulgarian and Albanian, and in some cases Greek and Serbian.
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.
The Slavic influence was first due to the migration of Slavic tribes, which traversed the territory of today's Romania during the formation of the language. It is interesting to note that Slavs were assimilated north of Danube, whereas they almost completely assimilated the Romanized population (Vlachs) living south of Danube. An important part of this population was still Vlach in the 10th century, only to fade away along with Vlach political power. For more information about this, see Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian.
Slavic influence continued during the Middle Ages, mainly due to the fact that Church Slavonic was the main liturgical language until the 18th century. The other surrounding languages (all Slavic, with the exception of Hungarian) also influenced Romanian.
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.
There are some Slavonic influences, both on the phonetic level and on the lexical level—for example Romanian took the Slavonic da for yes.
Even before the 19th century, Romanian came in contact with several other languages. Notable among these are:
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.
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:
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.
Romanian nouns are inflected by gender (feminine, masculine and neuter), number (singular and plural) and case (nominative/accusative, dative/genitive and vocative). The articles, as well as most adjectives and pronouns, agree in gender with the noun they reference.
Romanian is the only Romance language where definite articles are enclitic: that is, attached to the end of the noun (as in North Germanic languages), instead of in front (proclitic). They were formed, as in other Romance languages, from the Latin demonstrative pronouns.
Romanian has four verbal conjugations which further split into ten conjugation patterns. Verbs can be put in five moods that are inflected according to the person (indicative, conditional/optative, imperative, subjunctive, and presumptive) and four impersonal moods (infinitive, gerund, supine, and participle).
The first written record of a Romanic language spoken in the Middle Ages in the Balkans was written by the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes Confessor in the 6th century about a military expedition against the Avars from 587, when a Vlach muleteer accompanying the Byzantine army noticed that the load was falling from one of the animals and shouted to a companion "Torna, torna fratre" (meaning "Return, return brother!").
The oldest written text in Romanian is a letter from 1521, in which Neacşu of Câmpulung wrote to the mayor of Braşov about an imminent attack of the Turks. It was written using the Cyrillic alphabet, like most early Romanian writings. The earliest writing in Latin script was a late 16th century Transylvanian text which was written with the Hungarian alphabet conventions.
In the late 1700s, Transylvanian scholars noted the Latin origin of Romanian and adapted the Latin alphabet to the Romanian language, using some rules from Italian, recognized as Romanian's closest relative. The Cyrillic alphabet remained in (gradually decreasing) use until 1860, when Romanian writing was first officially regulated.
In the Soviet Republic of Moldova, a special version of the Cyrillic alphabet derived from the Russian version was used, until 1989, when it returned to the Romanian Latin alphabet.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Romanian language".
last update April 28th, 2006