Romanian language,Romance language spoken primarily inRomania andMoldova. Four principaldialects may be distinguished:Dacoromanian, the basis of the standardlanguage, spoken in Romania and Moldova in several regional variants;Aromanian (also called Macedoromanian), spoken in scatteredcommunities inGreece, the Republic of North Macedonia,Albania,Bulgaria,Kosovo, andSerbia;Meglenoromanian, a nearly extinctdialect of northern Greece and southeastern North Macedonia; andIstroromanian, also nearly extinct, spoken inIstria, a peninsula that is part ofCroatia andSlovenia. Mutual intelligibility between the major dialects is difficult; the Meglenoromanian, Istroromanian, and Aromanian are sometimes classed as languages distinct from Romanian proper, or Dacoromanian, which has many slightly varying dialects of its own.Moldovan, the national language of Moldova, is a form of Dacoromanian. It is written in theLatin alphabet.

In the early 21st century there were about 23,943,000 speakers of Romanian, of whom about 19,900,000 were living in Romania, some 3,000,000 in Moldova, some 318,000 inUkraine, some 250,000 inIsrael, about 200,000 in Serbia, and 14,000 inHungary. There are about 147,000 Romanian speakers in theUnited States. An additional 114,000 speak Aromanian.

Romanianphonology and grammar have developed in rather different directions from those of most other Romance languages because of the language’s relative isolation from other Romance languages and its close contact with theSlavic languages as well asHungarian,Turkish, andAlbanian. Romanian continues aLatin distinction between longo and shortu, fused in most other Romance languages, but, like almost all others, it has lost the Latin distinction between longe and shorti. In consonant clusters there has been a tendency to replace velar consonantsk andg with labial consonants, such asp, b, orm (e.g., Latinŏcto ‘eight,’ Romanianopt; Latincognatum ‘relative, kinsman,’ Romaniancumnat). Nouns in Romanian have two cases, direct (nominative-objective) and oblique (possessive-dative), and have separate singular and plural forms for the noun standing alone and the noun with the definite article suffixed. Verbs have a shortened infinitive (e.g.,a cînta from Latincantare ‘to sing’), and the futuretense is formed by acompound of theverba vrea ‘to wish’ plus the infinitive of the verb—voi cînta ‘I will sing’; analternative method of future formation is to use theauxiliary verba avea ‘to have’ plussă plus the subjunctive of the verb—am să cînt ‘I will sing.’

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The standard language of Romania is based on aWalachian variety ofDacoromanian, the majority group of dialects; it was developed in the 17th century mainly by religious writers of the Orthodox church and includes features from a number of dialects, thoughBucharest usage provides the current model. Dacoromanian is fairlyhomogeneous but shows greater dialectaldiversity in theTransylvanian Alps, from which region the language may have spread to the plains. Duringthe Soviet era the language of Moldova was written in theCyrillic alphabet, called “Moldavian,” and held by Soviet scholars to be an independent Romance language. Currently called either Romanian or Moldovan, since 1989 the language has been written in the Roman alphabet. While theMeglenoromanian (Meglenitic) andIstroromanian dialects are both nearly extinct,Aromanian is more vigorous. Numbers have probably decreased considerably, but certainly before 1940 Aromanians were often prominent businessmen in their localities. The first known inscription in Aromanian, dated 1731, was found in 1952 at Ardenita, Albania; texts date to the end of the 18th century, and literary texts were published in the 19th and 20th centuries (mostly in Bucharest).

The first known Dacoromanian text is a private letter of Walachian origin dated 1521, though some manuscript translations of religious texts show Transylvaniandialect features and may be earlier. The oldest printed texts areEvangheliarul slavo-român (1551–52; “The Slavo-Romanian Gospels”) ofSibiu and the works of Deacon Coresi, beginning in 1559. The vast majority of early texts are written inCyrillic script, the Roman (Latin) alphabet having been officially adopted in 1859 at the time of the union ofWalachia andMoldavia.Literature in Romanian began to flourish in the 19th century, when the emerging nation turned toward other Romance countries, especiallyFrance, for cultural inspiration. That circumstance had important consequences for the language, triggering the so-called re-Romanization of Romanian.