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Romanian linguistic data
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Common questions about Romanian
What linguistic data does this Romanian page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Romanian's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Romanian data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
Why is Romania's definite article suffixed instead of prepositional?
Romanian is the only major Romance language with a postpositional definite article — lup 'wolf', lupul 'the wolf'. This pattern is shared with the other Balkan languages (Bulgarian, Albanian, Macedonian) and is part of the 'Balkan sprachbund' — typological convergence among unrelated languages spoken in close geographic contact for centuries.
What's the relationship between Romanian and Moldovan?
Linguistically the same language. Standard Moldovan and Standard Romanian are mutually intelligible with negligible differences. Moldova used a Cyrillic script during the Soviet period (1924-1989), but switched back to Latin script after independence. Politically the two countries treat them as separate names; linguistic literature and Moldova's own constitution acknowledge they're a single language.
Why does Romanian have a high similarity score with Italian or Spanish?
All three are Romance languages descended from Vulgar Latin, share SVO order and similar verb morphology, with substantial cognate vocabulary. Romanian diverged most by absorbing Slavic, Hungarian, Greek, and Turkish vocabulary through Balkan contact. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for Romanian
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Mallinson, Graham (1986). "Romanian." Croom Helm Descriptive Grammars.
- Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela (2013). "The Grammar of Romanian." Oxford University Press.
- Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen & Giurgea, Ion (2006). "The Syntax of Romanian." Oxford University Press.
- Cojocaru, Dana (2003). "Romanian Grammar." SEELRC, Duke University.