🇷🇴Romanian for English speakers

1. What is Romanian?

Romanian (limba română) is a Romance language — the modern descendant of the Latin once spoken in the Roman province of Dacia — and the only major Romance language in Eastern Europe. It has around 24 million native speakers and is the official language of Romania and of Moldova (where the same language has also been called Moldovan), as well as an official language of the European Union.

For an English speaker, Romanian is a rewarding surprise: its core vocabulary is Latin and often recognisable from French, Italian, or Spanish, yet centuries in the Balkans gave it features its western cousins lack — most famously a definite article attached to the end of the noun.

A Romance language with a Balkan accent

Romanian shares the Balkan sprachbund traits of its neighbours: the postposed definite article, a surviving case system, and a subjunctive used where other Romance languages use an infinitive. Its vocabulary is mostly Latin, with a layer of Slavic and smaller Greek, Hungarian, and Turkish contributions.

Why learn Romanian?

• A familiar-yet-fresh Romance language — much vocabulary is transparent to anyone who knows French, Italian, or Spanish, but the grammar has genuinely new ideas.
• A Latin alphabet — only five extra letters (ă, â, î, ș, ț) stand between you and reading Romanian aloud.
• A large, connected community — speakers across Romania, Moldova, and a wide European and North American diaspora.
• A window on the Balkans — Romanian shows how Latin evolved under very different influences from the west.

2. Spelling and sounds

Romanian is written in the Latin alphabet with five special letters. Spelling is largely phonetic once you know their values.

3. Pronunciation

• â and î are the same sound — the spelling rule is about position, not pronunciation.
• ă is a real, full vowel, not a schwa to be swallowed — give it its weight.
• Final consonants are pronounced — unlike French, Romanian does not drop them.
• Stress is not marked in writing and can fall on different syllables, so learn it word by word.

4. Essential grammar

Romanian nouns have three genders — masculine, feminine, and neuter (neuter nouns behave like masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural). Its most striking feature is the definite article: 'the' is a suffix on the noun, not a separate word before it.

The indefinite article, by contrast, comes before the noun (un lup, 'a wolf'; o fată, 'a girl'). Romanian also keeps a reduced case system: a combined genitive-dative form (mostly visible on feminine nouns and on articles) shows possession and the indirect object.

Pronouns

The subjunctive with să

Where English (and western Romance) often uses an infinitive, Romanian tends to use a subjunctive introduced by să: vreau să merg, 'I want to go' (literally 'I want that I go'). Getting comfortable with să early makes a huge range of everyday sentences possible.

Verbs: the present tense

Verbs conjugate for person and number. A very common pattern is the -esc type (many -i verbs), shown here with a vorbi ('to speak'):

5. Numbers and everyday words

6. Common mistakes

• Looking for a separate word for 'the' — in Romanian it is a suffix (lupul, not 'el lup').
• Swallowing ă — treat it as a full vowel with its own weight, not a throwaway schwa.
• Confusing â and î — they are one sound; the choice between them is a spelling rule about position.
• Reaching for an infinitive — Romanian usually prefers a să-subjunctive for 'to do something' after another verb.
• Guessing gender — the neuter especially must be learned with each word, since it splits masculine/feminine by number.

7. Learning resources

• The Grammar of Romanian — Gabriela Pană Dindelegan (ed.), OUPadvanced — The standard comprehensive reference grammar of modern Romanian in English.
• DOOM3 — Romanian Academy orthographic dictionary (online)reference — The official spelling, pronunciation, and morphology dictionary — the authority on correct forms.
• Ethnologue — Romanianreference — Speaker numbers, regions, and status.
• Glottolog — Romanian (roma1327)reference — Classification and linked descriptive resources.

8. Culture & context

A Latin island

Romanians have long described their language as a 'Latin island in a Slavic sea'. That identity — Roman roots surrounded by Slavic, Hungarian, and Turkic neighbours — runs through the country's culture and its sense of itself.

Eminescu and the literary language

The nineteenth-century poet Mihai Eminescu is treated as the national poet and helped shape the modern literary language. His work is a natural, if demanding, goal for advanced learners.

Transylvania and its legends

Beyond the Dracula tourism, Transylvania is a real, multilingual region whose castles, Saxon towns, and folklore are deeply tied to Romanian history — and a rich source of vocabulary and stories.

Notes

• Gabriela Pană Dindelegan, ed., The Grammar of Romanian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩

Bibliography

Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela, ed. The Grammar of Romanian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Alexandru Rosetti". DOOM3 — Dicționarul ortografic, ortoepic și morfologic al limbii române. 3rd ed. București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, 2021. https://doom.lingv.ro/.

Ethnologue (SIL International). "Romanian." Accessed July 17, 2026. https://www.ethnologue.com/language/ron/.