The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
Romanian language
member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Romance languages). It is spoken by about 22 million people in Romania, where it is the official language, by 3 million people in Moldova, and by perhaps another 1 million persons scattered in Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, and Hungary. At the present time Romanian is written in the Roman alphabet, to which have been added the symbols , â, î, , and . In Moldova under Soviet rule, however, Cyrillic characters were used for Romanian. A distinctive feature of Romanian is the attachment of the definite article to the noun as a suffix, as in omul (literally, “man-the”). The oldest surviving Romanian texts are from the 16th cent., and there are four major dialects of the language.
, â, î, 
, and 
. In Moldova under Soviet rule, however, Cyrillic characters were used for Romanian. A distinctive feature of Romanian is the attachment of the definite article to the noun as a suffix, as in omul (literally, “man-the”). The oldest surviving Romanian texts are from the 16th cent., and there are four major dialects of the language.
