Romanian - interesting facts
Romanian is the mother tongue of 24 million people (about 0.4% of the world's population) and ranks 49th among the world's most spoken languages.
Limba română is the official language of Romania and Moldova, as well as Vojvodina (as one of the official languages) – an autonomous district in northern Serbia. It is also recognized as a language of national minorities in Ukraine and Hungary.
Romanian belongs to the group of Romance languages, namely the Eastern Romanesque subgroup (in many respects Romanian is similar to other languages of the Balkan Peninsula, i.e. Bulgarian, Albanian and Greek). Like other Romance languages, this language is derived from folk Latin. Its history in the medieval period is poorly known and documented. The first document confirming the existence of this language dates back only to the beginning of the 16th century (Neacșu's letter of 1521). Interestingly, Romanian was originally written in Cyrillic. It was not until 1860 that the Latin alphabet was officially sanctioned. The Cyrillic alphabet is valid only in Transnistria, an autonomous region of Moldova (this language variant is referred to as Moldovan).
The Romanian language does not show much dialectal diversity, and its variants differ only at phonetics. There are two main groups of dialects: northern and southern. The Bucharest-based Academia Română regulates the Romanian language.
In lexical terms, Romanian has the greatest convergence with Italian (both languages have more than 75% common vocabulary).
Although there are many similarities between limba română and other Romance languages, it is worth noting that about 14% of Romanian words are derived from Slavic languages. Examples include da (yes), duh (spirit) and nevastă (wife). In the past, the Romanian lexis contained an even greater number of borrowings from Slavic languages. Still, in the 19th century, as part of the re-romanization process, a significant part of the vocabulary derived from non-Romanic languages was eliminated.
The longest word in the Romanian language is the 44-letter noun pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcaniconioză, which means silica - a variation of pneumonia.
A very interesting word is the noun acioaiei (amalgam). This eight-letter word contains only one consonant.
Unlike other Romance languages, in Romanian, the article is appended at the end of the noun.
Romanian is one of the official languages of the EU.
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