Romanian

Yes — fully Romance, descending from Vulgar Latin spoken in the Roman province of Dacia roughly two thousand years ago. Romanian shares the same Latin grammatical core as Italian, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, with cognates across all of them. Centuries of geographic separation from the rest of the Romance world (with Slavic languages filling the surrounding territory) shaped its distinctive vocabulary and some grammatical features, but the family membership is uncontroversial.

Romanian attaches the definite article as a suffix to the end of the noun rather than placing it before. Lup (wolf) → lupul (the wolf); fată (girl) → fata (the girl). This pattern is shared with Albanian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian — all languages of the Balkan Sprachbund — and is thought to come from a centuries-long contact-driven convergence among the Balkan languages, even where they belong to different families.

Romanian is unique among Romance languages in preserving a productive neuter gender. Neuter nouns behave as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural — un scaun (a chair, like a masculine noun) → două scaune (two chairs, with feminine plural agreement). The pattern is regular and applies to a large class of nouns, especially inanimate objects.

Substantial — perhaps 10–15% of core vocabulary plus heavier loans in particular registers. Centuries of contact with Slavic-speaking neighbours (Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian) and the Slavonic liturgical tradition of the Romanian Orthodox Church left lasting layers. The result is a Romance grammar wrapped around a vocabulary that often surprises learners arriving from Italian or French.

Yes. The Soviet Union promoted 'Moldovan' as a separate language written in Cyrillic to distance Moldova from Romania, but the two were always linguistically identical. Moldova switched back to the Latin alphabet in 1989 and formally recognized the language as Romanian in its 2023 constitutional revision. Transnistria still uses Cyrillic for the same language.