Romanian Letters & Accents

The Romanian alphabet runs A Ă Â B C D E F G H I Î J K L M N O P Q R S Ș T Ț U V W X Y Z. The five extra letters are letters in their own right, not decorated versions of others: dictionaries put every word beginning with ă after all the words in a, so apă (water) comes before ăsta (this one), and the words in ș follow the last word in s. K, Q, W and Y appear almost only in names and borrowed words such as kilogram, whisky and yoga.

Romanian is a Romance language, a descendant of the Latin spoken in the eastern Balkans and along the Danube, and its spelling is largely phonetic: once you know what the five special letters do, you can read words aloud the way they are written. Two letter groups are worth knowing even though they are not letters of the alphabet: che, chi, ghe and ghi keep c and g hard (chec, ghid), while plain c and g before e and i are soft, as in cer (sky) and ger (frost).

Romanian accents on vowels: ă, â and î

Ă (a with breve) is the neutral vowel heard in the second syllable of English sofa. It is everywhere, because it ends many feminine nouns: casă (a house), mamă (mother), țară (country). Leaving it off can change the meaning, since the same word with a plain a is often the form with the definite article: casă is a house, casa is the house.

 and Î (a and i with circumflex) write one and the same sound, a close central vowel with no English equivalent, said with the tongue in the position for i but the lips spread and not rounded. The spelling rule since the Romanian Academy's 1993 reform is simple: î at the beginning and end of a word (înainte, a urî) and also at the start of the second part of a compound (neîncredere), â everywhere inside a word (câine, pâine, mâine, România). Romania's 1953 spelling replaced â with î everywhere, including in român and România; after 1964, â returned only in that word family. This is why you will still meet cîine and pîine in older books and in some writers who kept the older style.

Ș and Ț: a comma below, not a cedilla

Ș sounds like English sh (șase, six; școală, school) and Ț like ts in cats (țară, country; preț, price). Both carry a small comma under the letter. The marks matter: peste means over but pește means fish, and fata is the girl while fața is the face.

The correct characters are Ș ș (U+0218, U+0219) and Ț ț (U+021A, U+021B), which only arrived in Unicode 3.0 in 1999. Before that, the common Central European character sets had only the Turkish-style cedilla letters Ş ş and Ţ ţ, and older fonts and keyboard layouts kept producing them for years, so a great deal of Romanian text online still uses the cedilla forms. They look similar in many fonts but are different characters, so a search for școală may not find şcoală. Use the comma forms in anything new, and replace the cedilla forms when you edit old text; the look-alikes are listed separately in the grid so you can recognise and search for them.

How to type Romanian accents on a keyboard and phone

On Windows, add the Romanian (Standard) keyboard in Settings, Time & language, Language. On it, the keys a US keyboard has for [ ] ; ' and \ type ă î ș ț and â, and Shift gives the capitals. If you would rather keep the US letter positions, the Romanian (Programmers) layout types the special letters with AltGr (the right Alt key): AltGr+A ă, AltGr+Q â, AltGr+I î, AltGr+S ș and AltGr+T ț.

Without changing the layout, â and î have Alt codes on the number pad: Alt+0226 â, Alt+0194 Â, Alt+0238 î, Alt+0206 Î. Ă, ș and ț have no such code on a Western Windows setup; in Word, type the code and press Alt+X instead: 0103 ă, 0102 Ă, 0219 ș, 0218 Ș, 021B ț, 021A Ț. On a Mac, add Romanian – Standard under Keyboard, Input Sources, and open the Keyboard Viewer from the input menu to see where each letter sits. On Android and iPhone, add the Romanian keyboard and long-press a for ă and â, i for î, s for ș and t for ț.

In HTML, â and î have named entities (â, î) and so does ă (ă); write ș and ț as numbers, ș and ț, with Ș and Ț for the capitals. Any font you choose for Romanian should be checked for real comma-below letters; designers test with words like Șosea and Țară before printing.

Romanian punctuation, quotation marks and money

Romanian quotation marks open low and close high: „Vino acasă”, a pair of double low-9 and right double quotation marks. A quotation inside a quotation uses guillemets: „El a spus «nu»”. In novels and stories, dialogue lines start with the long dash —: — Bună ziua, spuse el. The hyphen, called cratimă, is very busy in Romanian because it joins words that are pronounced together: s-a dus, într-o zi, dă-mi, mi-e dor.

Numbers use a decimal comma and a dot or space for thousands: 1.250,50. Romania's currency, the leu (plural lei, code RON), and Moldova's leu (MDL) have no symbol of their own and are written with the word after the number, as in 25 de lei. The euro sign € is included because Romanians meet it all the time: flat, house and car prices in Romania are commonly quoted in euros, and millions of Romanians live and work in the eurozone.

Where Romanian is spoken

CLDR estimates around 20 million speakers of Romanian, about 16 million of them in Romania and about 2.3 million in Moldova, where it is the official language; other estimates that count the diaspora are higher. There are Romanian-speaking communities in Ukraine around Chernivtsi and in the Odesa region, and Romanian is one of the official languages of Serbia's Vojvodina province. Since 2007 it has been an official language of the European Union, and large communities live in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, Israel and Canada.

Romanian was written in the Cyrillic alphabet until the 1860s, and in Soviet Moldavia a Russian-based Cyrillic alphabet with the extra letter ӂ (for the j in gin) was used until Moldova returned to the Latin script in 1989. Its closest relatives are Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian; among the big Romance languages, see our Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan letter collections, and for Romania's neighbour, Hungarian letters.