Italian language and Romanian
What is the connection between Italian and Romanian? It amazes me how many people do not know that Romania comes from the Roman empire’s republic of Dacia. This means the language of Italian and Romanian are closely related. Modern Italian and Romanian are derivatives of Latin.
Many people believe that Romania is somehow gypsy or that they speak some Slavic language because they are an Eastern European country. The reality is Romanians are like Italians living in Eastern Europe in terms of culture, however, they are Dacian in genes. Or Italians are Romanians living in Western Europe. It is not only that they are both Romance languages, many languages like Spanish. Portuguese and French can claim this also, but Romania has a close tie with Italian because of the history of their nation. Other Romanic langauges are Catalan, Occitan, Corsican,Friulian, Leonese, Aromanian, Sardinian, Sicilian, Asturian, Galician,Venetian,and Neapolitan. Many people consider these languages as dialects of Italian. Something that is spoken at home but proper Italian is spoken on TV and in government offices.
Does the Roman Empire still exist
Linguistically yes it does. If you aggregate all the Romantic speaking languages then most of South America, central America, the southern US, Quebec Canada and Southern Europe as well as other places around the world speak languages and have the culture that was derived from Latin and Roman culture. The Romantic languages may in the end dominate the world because of current demographic trends connected with birth rates of Spanish speaking people.
Romantic languages like Italian, Romanian, Spanish and French are all over the world.
Can Romanians understand the Italian language
Yes, Romanians watch Italian language TV. Many Romanians work and live in Italy as both countries are EU countries and this means free movement of labor and capital.
I think for a Romanian to speak the Italian language or the other way around it would take about a month of studying Italian. However, even if you do not study Italian, a Romanian can understand it and communicate.
If they Study Italian they will be speaking it almost like a native after a brief time.
I think the difference between Spanish and Romanian are further linguistically than Italian to either one respectively. There are 700 million Romantic language speakers and of those 4% are Romania.
EU Italy and Romania
Italy is setting up clothing manufacturers in Romania. Italy is a fashion hub and Romania because of its communist experience, has cheap high quality labor. Therefore it is a good fit for business.
Some day Romania will be rich. Many people again find this hard to believe but it is true. Being in the Euro zone with free movement of capital and an educated population, you can not stop it from happening. It is like a valve has been opened up.
Many British investors have moved into Romania to get ahead of the game when it comes to participating in the growth of this country. Unfortunately this speculation bid prices up in the real estate market.
If I had extra cash I would personally invest in Romania. They have great high tech computer skills at a low price and the English language is spoken.
24 responses to Italian language related to Romanian
Great. You have done a marvelous job. the ideas of learning Italian language is really terrific. i am really impressed by your work.. good going all the best, keep it up
you did a really great job explaining about these two countries. im a romanian and i bearly knew that these two countries have that much in common.
Well, I am Romanian myself and I understand Italian and Spanish without studying it. Sardinian even better! They understand Romanian a little bit harder because we were separated from the other Romance languages and have some slavic influences. North-Ukraine
South-Bulgaria
West-Iugoslavia, Hungary
East-Moldavia [Romanian with a lot of slavic influences, but basicly Romanian.]
Many people belive we have a slavic language because of our neighbours. The truth is 80% of our language is latin. Though, in the past, when we were very exposed to Russian we were using the cyrillic alphabet for Romanian words. The spoken language was the same, the writing was diferent.
Like:
lat. amicus -> rom. amic [friend, pal]
Of course we have words “stolen” from others:
bacşiş [read as baksheesh with a like in After]from Turkey meaning tip, gratification or something like that.
oraş [read as orash with the After a] from Hungary meaning town.
uliţa [read as uleetsa, with the After a of course] from Russian meaning street.
And so on with French, English words and others.
I am really grateful for being Romanian because we have a native talent at languages. I don’t know why, some of us say its genetically, but its a fact that we can roll the R and say it both English and French way. I am studying Chinese now and I don’t have problems with their R either. Also, neither with the Russian, Indonesian or Japanese [studying this ones too] pronunciation. My aunt went to work in Spain without knowing a word, but after two years she came home being fluent. Same with other people close to me who went to Italy, Germany and other countries just with Romanian and little English bits. Thanks for posting informations about my country, this made my blush haha.
Oh, Sorry for writing this much and blahbbery! I just get worked up, Its my country, after all. :]] Also, excuse my english too, please!
I enjoy studying different Romance languages and am particularly fond of Romanian. It is a beautiful language with a lovely cadence and a deep, rich history. I shall look forward to my studies in this wonderful language!
Roman Empire comquer only 1/5 of ancient Dacia, and only for <200 years.
Great Britan was conquer by Romans 500 years, and still they didnt speak italian or latin, but english….
Romanians are not italians, are old tracians.
Some adn of romanian are like italians from N Italy , but not all.
Dacian( tracians) speaks latins before was conquerer by Roman Empire.
Dacians speaks vulgare latin, old one….
I love italians but we, romanians, does not have to do at all with they….
I can confirm that we are very good at computers, and also have an very good internet bandwith.
Some outsiders when they hear romanian on youtube or something they think it’s spanish.
Also, in Serbia, Macedonia, Grecia,Albania, Ucraina, there are a lot of romanian comunity from ancient times.
Rep Moldova is also romanian, steal by russians in 44.
Some parts of Romania is in Ucraina now, also steal by russian.
Never trust an russian.
If you hear the word ” aroman” or vlah” it means also romanian.
Do not confunde this with “rrom”, this is gipsy.We do not like gypsy, they steal and they are lazy, they didnt like to work.
They sell drugs, prostitute, steal in Romania and in any place they go.
Ukrainians have a right to their own country of Ukraine
Firstly, wrong, All of Ukraine belongs to the Ukraine. Secondly, you are have to question your openess to other cultures. Gypsies have been discriminated against for centuries in Eastern Europe. Hungarians are constantly threatened inside Romania.
Hungarians and Romanians a point of view
“Hungarians are constantly threatened inside Romania.”
You gotta be kidding me there. You should really watch the news more often. There are plenty of Hungarians within my country who are basically celebrating the deaths of Hungarian generals who killed lots of men, women and Romanian children. Moreover.. this is done with public money. Not to mention the fact that they’re asking for their own land within my country.
A few months ago a Hungarian set a puppet representing a Romanian personality on fire in a public place in front of tons of children too. The guy representing the Hungarian political party here sent out official government papers in Hungarian. Hello? Is Hungarian Romania’s main language? Also: there are plenty of villages in my country where nobody knows Romanian.
They all speak Hungarian and they threatened outside the village all the Romanian families. Now they changed ALL the street names from Romanian personalities to Hungarian. I can go on about this forever… they refuse to study Romanian, even if they live within Romania. From my point of view your statement should be something like “Hungarians are constantly threatening Romanians inside Romania.” Same goes for gipsies. The only fault Romanians have here is that they’re always turning the other cheek.
Please don’t make silly comments before checking the situation firstly.
I am Romanian too
I started studying English in the 2nd grade, followed by French in the 5th. That’s all I learned in school. However, I learned Spanish by watching TV[I can talk nearly like a native, but I cannot write everything correctly. I assume some words are written in a way and most of the time I get them right 
], I understand some Portuguese due to the similarity with Spanish, I find it easy to communicate with an Italian, even if I never ever had a class in Italian, and right now I am studying Japanese on my own. I don’t know if there’s anything special about those living in Romania, but most of my friends speak at least 2 other languages apart of Romanian.
I second what Bogdan wrote about the computing skills. Up until the middle of the 1st year in High School I had absolutely no idea how to turn on a computer. By the start of the 2nd year I could fix my own computer and always knew exactly which piece broke inside of it. By the middle of the 2nd year of High School I knew how to make different programs and thus I joined my parents with their business, managing with ease all their data, sorting it and everything else.
Cheers! ^_^
I am a Romanian living in Italy and yes, I think I have some talent in learning languages. I am fluent in Hungarian, English, Italian (took me about 6 months to get to fluency), Venetian (about 2-3 years, but mainly because it is less used in the city and TV/radio and had less exposure to it). I can also perfectly understand French, I studied it in school but never really tried to speak, I think I could become fluent in a few weeks of complete immersion. Anyway, it took me 2-3 days of training in order to pronounce the french R. I am studying chinese, and in a week (while driving) I learnt to pronounce the chinese “R”.
I think most romanian can understand partly italian also because most of them actually came in contact with the language, TV, radio or have been abroad. But, italians cannot understand romanian, maybe they can keep up some word… but… I have a colleague at work, she is italian (so she speaks venetian also), she is fluent in Spanish and French and currently studying Portugues, but she does not understand romanian.
I am very impressed, I think also you have a passion for laguages.
Hello to everyone
First. Italian (like Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian) is a Latin language (not Romance. Romance languages … does’ exists).
Second. If there is still the Roman Empire? Yes, It still exists. Do you think that most of the legal systems of the world is based on the ancient Roman law.
Third. For the Romanian who claims that Britain was dominated by the Romans in the past, but has not been Latin influences …. well enough to know that English is a language of Anglo-Saxon stock. But it has experienced tremendous Latin influences.
Fourth. All of us are the result of evolution and especially of history. The Romans themselves (and Latin) had a great influence of that which is the mother of all Western civilization (I’ve heard of many Eastern European countries, but this is the basis for everything …) the Greece.
Fifth. Following a further contribution to the mix language (and culture, mathematics, science, cooking, etc.) has provided the Arab world (in the Mediterranean area ) and Ottoman (…they are not Arabs) in the Balkans.
Sisth. Like the third …. There is the Roman Empire? Yes there is. Because of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the world, the migration, language, and (thank God) culture (literature, lifestyles, cooking, etc..) Latin is hegemonic in Central and South America, and is present in norther America’s, and so on.
Ciao.
I’m increasingly fascinated by the Romanian language. As a scholar and translator using the Italian language for many years (my native language is English), I’ve always been interested in the lexical relationship and similarities between these two “Eastern Romance” tongues.
Being neither native Italian or Romanian myself, I can’t speak for such natives about whether they do hear and find one another’s sister languages mutually intelligible easily. But at a personal guess, I’d wager that Romanians understand Italian more readily and quickly than Italians understand Romanian. My opinion is based on reasoning that due to both languages’ similarity to one another, Romanians probably understand Italian phrases as if they appeared to be Romanian expressions “drawn out” utilizing the various prepositional relationships that, in Romanian, are instead carried out by Romanian’s still-existing case endings and inflections. Meanwhile, I think that Italians probably hear similarities to their own language in listening to Romanian, due to lexical and pronunciation likenesses, however they may have a more difficult time understanding Romanian phrases’ meanings due to not comprehending the various case endings as well as Slavic overlying influences that are visible in Romanian in words that aren’t always cognates in Italian.
But Romanian is a beautiful language and, having learned and being able to understand Italian, Spanish, French and some Portuguese, it’s afforded me a heads-start in being able to understand, appreciate and master eventually the mechanics of the awesome Romanian language.
That is right. Italian and Spanish
I am Spanish native, also speak some Russian and English of course, Romanian can be read easily by Spanish speakers, sound like a mix of Hungarian and Napolizian or something, the articles are pretty much the same and so are the pronouns. Beautiful women and country. Enjoyed playing there.
Hungarian influence on Romanian
Hungarian language comes from Fino-Ungaric family of idioms. the influence of Hungarian over Romanian is so small, incomparable with Russian, Turkish, Slavic. It sounds so strange for me what you have stated.
Dacia and Romanian language
I am a Romanian, but the fact that I understand the Romance languages is due to the real relation existing between Dacians and Romans, that is that the Romans came to the Italia Peninsula from the northern Danubian territories, which makes Dacian and Latin languages closely related.
Besides, Romanian and Italian can only be understood mutually at a very superficial level. As one enters higher levels of understanding, one sees that the resemblance no longer exists. Because the two languages are related but between them there are millenia of separate evolution.
One thing is for sure: Romanian is not the Latin language evolved on Carpathian space, but the Dacian language continued in the region for millenia, with some Latin influences.
Who are the Romanians
We are Romanians, and not Roman dependents. If anything the converse is true as Romanian have one of the greatest histories in Europe.
♥ ♥ You, Daco-Roman people, wake up, take off your short-sighted glasses – that your neighbors forced you to put on and wear – and look proudly into your remote past, re-discover yourselves and don’t be too modest to admit what you see
♥ ♥ Nobody in Europe has an older, more beautiful and more fabulous history than ours.
♥ ♥ We should bear in mind that we were the first to set foot on this European Land, and that we did it before the Greeks, the Italians, the English or the Slavs.
All these newcomers wish we had not existed so that they might have certain rights! Some even say Transylvania had been a vacant place, so when they came they just settled there, on an unoccupied territory. The same people urge us even more to believe – fool as we are – that we appeared after 106 AD, as a result of the “union” between two men – Trajan and Decebalus – the former conquering 14% of the Dacian territory after a fratricidal war.
♥ ♥ No, Sirs, thank you! We have our own history, that had begun long before the Romans took over kilometers of the Dacian territory. Our history started a long time ago, when we, founders of Europe, set ourselves to conquer Asia, China, India, Japan, Anatolia, Sumer, and Asia Minor, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Northern Africa.
♥ ♥ ♥ This is our history – the history of the Carpatho-Danubian people, of the Pelasgians, of the Thracians, of the Daco-Ramantes. We, the Daco-Roman people represent the backbone of the contemporary world’s history.
♥ ♥What Codex Rohonczy, Joannes Magnus, Bonaventura Vulcanius, Carolus Lundius, N. Densuseanu, Marija Gimbutas, Dumitru Balasa, the priest and history researcher (see his Tale of Romanization), Ph.D. Prof. Augustin Deac (The Romanians, Geto-Dacians’ Late Nephews) defend, namely that the DACIANS WERE SPEAKING VULGAR LATIN BEFORE Rome itself existed, sounds by far more logical.
♥ ♥.Inside the Romanian territory have been discovered the traces of various civilizations between 7,500 – 3,500 B.C.
♥ ♥…The “Pre-Cucuteni” culture is considered by the American specialist Marija Gimbutos for being the oldest European culture with the pre-Indo-European population at its development apogee between 5,000 – 4,000 B.C. Well the Carpatho-Danubian Space as of the cradle of Ancient Europe, while she calls its inhabitants the creators and founders of the European civilization, long before the Greek and Judeo-Christian civilizations flourished.
♥ ♥…The “Boian” culture (4,000 – 3,800 B.C.) left us the first sanctuary created from clay and the “Hamangia” culture the first statute worked in marble in human history and the anthropomorphous clay statutes “The Thinker and his woman.”
dacia.org/history/dacii_e.html
Italian language related to Romanian
You are correct. I was sweeped up with the idea that Romanians inherted a lot of Roman culture, including the language, but the people are a mix of Dacian and other ancient people with Roman culture over it.
Good history of the Romanians. Thank you. I guess the post was more about language, of which there is a 78% similarity in lexicon with Italian and Romanian. However, you are right that the two genetic pools are not the same. However, remember we in Europe most of us came from the same Indo-European homeland.
But if anyone wants to add more detail to this it would be appreciated as I want people to know who are the Romanians more than just a country in Europe somewhere out there.
Mark, I’m Romanian and i ‘m living in Poznan / Poland ( my husband is polish ) … and i’m very very surprised that many Polish knows that Dacia was created by the Roman Empire! also about language we was spoken latin vulgar… before Roman Empire to came (they capture only 40% from Dacia ) ..any way, congratulation for your topik
Gretings from Poznan
Sara
Romanian and Italian languages
I agree Italian and Romanian are related or “cousin” languages in a way. Romanian shares some features with Italian, particularly the Southern dialects like Sicilian, Neapolitan, and interestingly also Sardinian, which are not found in other Romance languages. The intelligibility is also brought about by loan words and a modernization of the language, which I’ll get to later.
I’m sorry to be a jerk about this, but some people here have said some really stupid things that aren’t based on sound or solid fact at all. I am a Romanian, but in reality no serious academic whatsoever gives even the slightest bit of seriousness to the so-called “theory” that Dacians spoke Vulgar Latin before the Romans got there. That’s a nationalist “pro-chronist” theory resulting from wishful thinking of always wanting to be consistent in language and the oldest in Europe, and is frankly ridiculous; I don’t mind personally if it was true, but I am more concerned with historic fact. First of all, you guys are mostly probably kids throwing around terms that you don’t even know about or know what they fully mean. Vulgar Latin (including its many regional variants) was the unwritten informal Latin spoken by the masses of common people as opposed to the formal written Latin used by educated writers in the Classical era. It is clear that the basis for Romanian comes from some kind of Roman colonization effort. The core of Romanian is undoubtedly Latin based, including most of its grammar and basic words. (It was however, artificially re-Latinized significantly later in the 18th and 19th century after Romania came into contact with France and re-discovered its “Latin” heritage; thousands of modern, scientific, and technical words were added, mostly at the expense of old existing Slavic words that had entered the language in the Middle Ages, mostly through the Bulgarian or Old Church Slavonic language, which also introduced Cyrillic, unlike Russian as someone else stated earlier. However, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and even Italian to an extent also modernized their languages and borrowed from Latin, but earlier than Romanian, in the Middle Ages. Overall about a third of Romanian is naturally inherited from Vulgar Latin, about 38% borrowed from French/Italian/Literary Latin, today about 20% Slavic- though more in the past, and the rest some (mostly Modern) Greek and a little Hungarian and Turkish).
Anyway about the Dacian language, there isn’t strong evidence for its structure, lexicon or vocabulary. We mostly know some proper names like Burebista, Decebalus (Latinized form), locations like -davas or forts, some names of deities like Zalmoxis, and many plant names that were recorded. It is believed that Romanian may share a “substratum” (the layer or language surviving from before the Roman conquest) of a few hundred words with Albanian, which is believed to be derived from Illyrian, related to Thracian and Dacian. It was most likely not related closely to Italic languages like Latin other than just both being Indo-European languages ultimately (Thracian was Satem and Latin was centum). As for the short occupation of the Romans, there are those (mostly Hungarians) who believe Romanian’s ancestors were originally from the more heavily Latinized and much-longer occupied Roman provinces in the Balkans south of the Danube, near the other Romanian languages: Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian. Who knows if this is true, but there are several Christian terms inherited from Latin that are tricky because Christianity only became accepted in 313 after the legions withdrew from Dacia in 272, and there are words from Late Latin in Romanian. Anyway, I’m not here to support the Rossler theory, just trying to throw some reality into this so people realize what’s going on.
But yeah I hope the situation with Romanians and Italy will improve. I have ancestry from both peoples so I do enjoy comparing languages and whatnot. But I also must say that Romanians are mostly a typical Eastern European country as far as culture; not much was preserved from the Roman occupation.
Italian language related to Romanian
From Serbian point of view
-Some of us think that in Romania live only gypsies. They think that Romania is not very developed country and that they hate us or somting. That is sad, because it is not true.
-Vlah is not always Romanian, there are many Vlahs in Serbia and they speak Romanian but they belong to Serbian culture. I am 1/16 Vlah.
-People are different, and every culture has lazy and bed people. Thats why we mustnt be racist.
Italian & Romanian the connection
Romanian is a romance(latin) language with some slavic words but despite this Romanians can understand at least half of italian. If Romanians learn just a bit of italian I’m sure they’ll speak it like a native quickly.
I am Lithuanian and I think some of my language is related to Latin, for example:
Tu esi mano saule (Lithuanian)
You are my son (English)
Do you understand it?
Tu = you
Esi = are
Mano = my
Saule = sun
Also other words of my language are similar to English, Russian, Iranian, even Japanese/Pacific.
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