Romanian belongs to the Balkan subgroup of the Eastern Romance languages in the Indo-European language family and is an official, native and major language for 90 per cent of the Romanian population and 78.4 per cent of the Moldovan population (under the title of Moldovan).

The language is also spoken in a number of Ukrainian regions, particularly in Odessa and Chernivtsi regions. The total number of Romanian speakers is around 20 million. Of all Romance languages, Romanian was most heavily influenced from outside (especially by Slavic languages) which made it practically incomprehensible for the speakers of Western Romance languages. Although seemingly similar in terms of the language, the French, Italian and Spaniards will not understand Romanians speaking. Conversely, Romanians will neither understand their Western colleagues.

The Romanian script emerged only in the early 16th century, building on the Cyrillic alphabet. The first written record in Latin dates back to the late 16th century, found in Transylvania and using the Hungarian alphabet. In 1860—1863, the Romanian government introduced a new modified Latin-based Romanian alphabet. 

What is typical of Romanian is few dialects. Dialects of different regions have nearly no differences, except for the dialects of Transylvania and a peculiar Moldovan dialect.

If you need an urgent translation, apostil, legalization or notarized document, please get in touch with the Tallinn-based ATCG Translation Agency. Our translators are good at Romanian as well as native speakers. We shall provide simultaneous and consecutive interpretation from/into Romanian at any event.