SUNY Stony Brook 
November 2004
Department of Linguistics
LIN 522: Phonetics

Language Sketch: Romanian

Michael Helten

I. Introduction

Romanian is a Romance language, and as such part of the Indo-European language family. This language sketch will make an attempt at outlining Daco-Romanian. Daco- Romanian is one of four types of Balkan Romance, and among these it is by far the mostspoken – Daco-Romanian (hereafter referred to as Romanian again for reasons of simplicity) has some 21 million speakers, most of whom live in today’s Romania and Moldavia, while the other three types are spoken by only a few thousand speakers each. Romanian itself has two principal dialects, Moldavian and Muntenian. The latter is the one that underlies the literary language that developed in the 18th century and it is based on the language spoken in Bucharest, and it is also the dialect this phonetic approach will come closest to.

II. The vowel system

[...]

One of the most characteristic features of Romanian is certainly that, apart from the five vowel phonemes [a], [e], [i], [o] and [u], which can also be found in closely related languages like Spanish or Italian and in many other languages, Romanian also has the back unrounded vowels [.] and [.]. The high [.] occurs mostly before nasals, and with an occurrence of about 4% it is the least frequent of the seven vowels. Although it is relatively close to English [.], the high-mid [.] also occurs in stressed syllables, for example in par (hair), da (giveimp.) and cântam (we sing). [.] has the same quality whether it is in a stressed or in an unstressed syllable – so do all of the other vowel phonemes.

Although most distributional patterns of the sounds of Romanian will be discussed further down, I want to point out at this stage that a back unrounded vowel cannot be preceded by any semivowel or by any palatal sound.

Some (near) minimal pairs to exemplify the contrast between the seven vowels:

[....]