Romanian language

• 1. Introduction

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  Romanian carries within it a letter that no other major Romance language possesses: a small, curved diacritic called a breve that survives today only in the vowel ă, the schwa sound at the heart of everyday speech. That one mark is a fossil from an older writing system, a quiet reminder that this language spent centuries written in Cyrillic script before the Latin alphabet became official in 1860. Romanian is spoken today as a first language by 22 million people, and it is the official tongue of both Romania and Moldova. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of Roman provinces in Southeastern Europe, yet it evolved in a way that set it apart from every other Romance language on earth. How did a language rooted in Latin end up sharing grammatical features with Bulgarian, Albanian, and Greek? Why did it spend more than three centuries written in the alphabet of the Orthodox Slavic church? And why, even today, are citizens of Moldova arguing in parliament and constitutional courts over what to call the language they speak? Those are the questions this documentary will pursue.

• 2. Born from Roman Provinces

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  Scholars trace Romanian's origins to the Latin spoken north of the Jireček Line, a hypothetical boundary separating the zones of Latin and Greek cultural dominance in ancient Southeastern Europe. Roman withdrawal from Dacia in the 3rd century left behind a population whose vernacular continued to evolve, though exactly where and how remains disputed. Three competing hypotheses exist: the autochthony thesis, which holds that Romanian developed solely in left-Danube Dacia; the discontinuation thesis, placing its origin entirely in right-Danube provinces; and the "as-well-as" thesis, which accepts development on both sides of the Danube.

  By the 6th to 8th centuries, accumulated changes in the vernacular had produced what researchers call Common Romanian, a proto-language shared across this broad region. Close contact with Slavic languages then broke this proto-language into four descendants: Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, and Daco-Romanian. Today, most scholars agree that the northern dialect of Common Romanian gave rise to Daco-Romanian and Istro-Romanian, while the southern dialect produced Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian. Istro-Romanian, the smallest of the four, is now spoken by no more than 2,000 people in Istria. The gap in written evidence between the 6th and 16th centuries is so large that researchers must reconstruct entire stages of the language's history using proposed relative chronologies and loose limits.

• 3. Cyrillic Centuries

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  The oldest surviving written text in Romanian is a letter from late June 1521, in which a man named Neacșu of Câmpulung wrote to the mayor of Brașov to warn of an imminent Turkish attack. That letter was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, as were nearly all early Romanian texts. Even before that, from the 12th or 13th century onward, official documents and religious texts in the Romanian-speaking lands were composed in Old Church Slavonic, a language that played the same prestige role that Medieval Latin filled in Western Europe.

  The oldest Romanian writing identified so far is the Hurmuzaki Psalter, dated by its watermarks to between 1491 and 1504. It is a bilingual document: Church Slavonic text with a Romanian translation added after each verse, which reveals that the motivation for early Romanian writing was practical access to religious content rather than literary ambition. Analysis of these early texts shows that the writing of Romanian in Cyrillic script began in the second half of the 15th century. The letter is the oldest testimony of Romanian epistolary style and draws heavily on a Latin-origin vocabulary, even though it wears a Slavic script.

  The Cyrillic alphabet remained in gradually decreasing use until 1860, when Romanian writing was first officially regulated and the Latin alphabet took over. In Moldova under Soviet rule, a Russian-derived Cyrillic system was used until 1989. In the breakaway territory of Transnistria, Cyrillic remains in use to this day.

• 4. The Modern Age Begins in Vienna

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  In 1780, a grammar book printed in Vienna changed the trajectory of the Romanian language. Titled Elementa linguae daco-romanae sive valachicae, it was written by Samuil Micu-Klein and revised by Gheorghe Șincai, both members of the Transylvanian School. They chose Latin as the language of the text and presented Romanian's phonological and grammatical features by comparing them to its ancient ancestor. That book gave the language its modern scholarly name, lingua Daco-Romana, and launched a conscious movement to re-latinize Romanian vocabulary.

  The period from 1780 to 1830 saw the publication of school textbooks, the first normative works in Romanian, numerous translations, and early magazines. Curierul Românesc and Albina Românească were among the first Romanian-language periodicals to appear. The next phase, from 1831 to 1880, brought literary styles: scientific, administrative, and belletristic writing all developed rapidly. The journal Dacia Literară, founded by Mihail Kogălniceanu, spread ideas of Romantic nationalism alongside publications such as Propășirea and Gazeta de Transilvania. Writers and thinkers of this era are collectively called pașoptiști in Romania, a name derived from 1848, the year of the revolutions they influenced. Among them were Vasile Alecsandri, Grigore Alexandrescu, Nicolae Bălcescu, and Timotei Cipariu.

  On the 1st of April 1866, an academic society called Societatea Literară Română was founded on the initiative of C. A. Rosetti, with the purpose of standardizing orthography, formalizing grammar, and promoting literary and scientific publication. That institution later became the Romanian Academy, which implemented the current Latin-based orthography in 1881 on a fundamentally phonological principle.

• 5. A Language Shaped by Neighbors

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  Romanian began with fewer than 2,500 attested words from Late Antiquity and grew to a lexicon of over 150,000 words in its contemporary form. That growth came through contact with an unusually wide range of languages: Thraco-Dacian, various Slavic languages including Old Slavic, Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and Russian, plus Greek, Hungarian, German, Turkish, French, and Italian. English words have been entering the lexicon with increasing speed in recent decades.

  Slavic influence is especially visible. Words of Slavic origin make up roughly 10-15% of the modern Romanian lexicon, and the influence extends into phonetics, morphology, and syntax. Most of this Slavic vocabulary traces to Old Church Slavonic, which served as the official written language of Wallachia and Moldavia from the 14th to the 18th century. As a result, much Romanian vocabulary dealing with religion, ritual, and hierarchy is Slavic in origin. The high frequency of Slavic-derived everyday words is also taken as evidence of close contact or cohabitation with South Slavic communities from around the 6th century.

  German loans arrived through Austrian rule of Banat, Transylvania, and Bukovina, and the borrowing covered military, administrative, and technical fields. Everyday words like cartof (potato) from Kartoffel and bere (beer) from Bier came from this contact. Turkish contributed papuc (slipper), ciorbă (sour soup), and bacșiș (tip). A 1988 study by linguist Marius Sala, working from 2,581 words chosen for frequency and semantic richness, found that Latin inheritance (direct plus academic loans) accounted for roughly 45% of that core vocabulary, with French loans at 22%, Old Church Slavonic at 9%, and Italian at nearly 4%. Adding French and Italian loans to native Latin stock, about 75-85% of Romanian words can be traced back to Latin.

  Romanian also shares grammatical features with Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian, Greek, and Serbo-Croatian that are not found in any other Romance language: a suffixed definite article, merged genitive and dative case forms, and a future tense formed without an infinitive. Scholars link these shared features to the long history of multilingual coexistence across the Balkans.

• 6. The Moldovan Question

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  Romanian is the official language of the Republic of Moldova, but the path to that simple statement ran through decades of political contention. Moldova's 1991 Declaration of Independence named the official language Romanian. The Constitution adopted in 1994, however, called the state language "Moldovan." In December 2013, the Constitutional Court of Moldova ruled that the Declaration of Independence took precedence over the Constitution and that the language should be called Romanian. On the 16th of March 2023, the Moldovan Parliament passed a law making "Romanian" the official name in all legislative texts and the constitution. On the 22nd of March 2023, President Maia Sandu promulgated the law.

  The numbers from census data reveal a society in flux. In the 2014 census, 24% of the population of Moldova declared Romanian as their most commonly spoken language, while 56% declared Moldovan. By the 2024 census, those figures had shifted: 31.3% declared Romanian as their mother tongue, while 49.2% declared Moldovan. The share identifying with Romanian increased by 8.1 percentage points between the two censuses, and the shift was sharpest among young people. In the 20-29 age group, those declaring Romanian as their mother tongue slightly outnumbered those declaring Moldovan.

  Scholars agree that Moldovan and Romanian are the same language. The distinction exists in political naming rather than linguistic substance. In the breakaway territory of Transnistria, the language is still called Moldovan and written in Cyrillic script, one of the few places on earth where that writing system for Romanian remains in official use. Romanian Language Day is celebrated on the 31st of August each year in Romania.

• 7. Pop Culture and Global Reach

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  Romanian accounts for 0.5% of the world's population and 4% of all Romance-language speakers. Yet the language has reached audiences far beyond its geographic base through music and film. The band O-Zone, originally from Moldova, became internationally known in 2003-2004 when their single Dragostea Din Tei - also known as Numa Numa - reached number one across the world. The same group released a song specifically dedicated to the language itself, titled Nu mă las de limba noastră, whose final verse translates as "I won't forsake our language, our Romanian language."

  Several other acts built significant followings outside Romania: Akcent became popular in the Netherlands, Poland, and other European countries, while Alexandra Stan reached a worldwide number-one position with Mr. Saxobeat. Romanian cinema has attracted awards at the Cannes Film Festival, with films including 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 12:08 East of Bucharest, and California Dreamin' all receiving recognition there.

  Beyond entertainment, Romanian has a notable presence in the Middle East. In 1995, Romanian was spoken by an estimated 5% of the population of Israel, making that country home to the largest Romanian-speaking community in the region. Almost half a million Middle Eastern Arabs are estimated to have studied in Romania during the 1980s, creating a generation of Arabic speakers with Romanian as a second language. Romanian is currently taught as a foreign language in 43 countries around the world, including Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. The Romanian Cultural Institute has organized summer courses for language teachers since 1992, and the longest word admitted by the standard Explanatory Dictionary of the Romanian Language, electroglotospectrografie, runs to 25 letters.