Italian language related to Romanian

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.

Author: Mark Biernat

I live in with family between two worlds, US and Europe where I create tools for language learning. If you found my site you probability share my passion to be a life long learner. Please explore my site and comment.

56 thoughts on “Italian language related to Romanian”

  1. 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

  2. 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.

  3. 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!

  4. 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!

  5. 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….

    1. The Romans were an Italic tribe that dominated the other ones, nothing to do with the Thracians, who did not speak a proto Latin language. Intolerable that they try to steal our past. It is known that Dacia, after the Roman conquest, suffered a massive Roman colonization, that explains why Romanian is a Romance language.

      1. My Italian friend I think you should dig dipper into history, you have a lot of information to learn.
        Historic facts :
        1. Only 15% of Dacia (which was twice the size of Romania today) was conquered by Roman empire
        2. Only two legions stayed (that is roughly 10000 men) during the occupation
        3. Do you honestly believe that a country that had a surface of 600000 square kilometers, was inhabited by a strong, respected nation (follow Traian’s Column in Rome)would abandon their language in 165 years?
        4 If so, why it didn’t happened again over and over again in the last 1800 years for Romanians were for 800 years under the Turkish empire, 300 under the Austria-Hungarian Empire, 200 under the Russian Empire?
        5. The genetic studies done on the bones of Dacians tombs were compared with bones from Romanians today and there is more than 75% similarity in the DNA. So those 10000 men manage do dissipate the DNA of a entire population.

        So, my Italian brother, if I can call you that (you are my brother because as we know, Italians are Tracians, and as we know Dacians are Tracians) we are brothers because we share the same proto-Indo-European language and not because of conquest

        P.S. I could go on more and give you more proves but I think, tu sei troppo intelligente and you can follow what I’ve said here and dig more yourself

        Thank you

  6. 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, lady, steal in Romania and in any place they go.

    1. 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.

      1. “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.

      2. Can you please tell me in which EU country today, in different parts of the country (depending on which minority is predominant) has all the sings on the streets, all the public offices names, multilingual? Well is Romania of course. As in Banat (Romanian region) you get sings in Romanian, Hungarian Serbian and sometimes German; in center and west of Transylvania you have signs in Hungarian and Romanian, in the north you get Romanian and Ukrainian, in east Romanian and Russian.
        You should look a little bit at history and you’ll find a lot of massacres done by the Hungarians (don’t forget they were part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire) but you won’t find Romanians killing Hungarians. I want proves not what you heard on TV. On the other hand look around you today at what the Hungarian government is doing. So do not throw mud like this, shame on you.

    2. 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! ^_^ 🙂

  7. 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. 🙂

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

    1. 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.

    2. Just a little input from a Spanish speaker.

      Someone left a comment stating that “Romanian can be read easily by Spanish speakers.” As a native Spanish speaker, I completely disagree with this. Yes, I can look over a Romanian text and identify some words here and there, allowing me to make an educated guess about what is being said. But saying that Spanish speakers can easily read Romanian is an over-statement. There are so many words that look nothing like their Spanish counterparts. Romanian has a lot of vocabulary taken from its neighboring Slovak languages, which makes it difficult (if not impossible) for Spanish speakers to identify the meaning of a significant portion of Romanian vocabulary.
      I would say that it is much easier for us to read scientific texts as the scientific vocabulary is more uniform between the two languages.

  11. 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.

    1. 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.

  12. 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

    1. 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.

    2. 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. 🙂

      1. 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

  13. 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.

    1. Some time ago I was sharing exactly the same opinion with you but then I have seen an article who caught my attention. And I started to dig more and more and it is amazing what you find. You’re a Romanian? please stand up for your rights, for your rights to know your true history. A country can only move ahead if knows its past. So far we don’t know it, we know what the communists wanted us to know, and what Vatican wanted 150 years ago that we know.
      Yes there is a link between Romanian language today and the Latin language but to say that the Dacians has taken over the Latin from Roman Empire and that’s the reason of the Romanian language today it is childish. please have a bit of common sense: no country can completely forget their own language (since hundreds of years) and completely assimilate a new one (Latin brought by the Romans). British have been much more years under the Romans and they still speak English. Romania has been almost 500 years under Turkish domination and they don’t speak at all Turkish.
      The Roman Empire has conquered only 20% from Dacia and only for 165 years – from a grand father speaking his own language until his nephew who’s speaks Latin and not any more their mother tongue. Perhaps they were speaking English between them.
      I guess after the Romans left, the remaining 80% from the Dacians have said: as of today, nobody speaks Dacian any more (or whatever they have spoken at the time) and we will all speak this fancy new language brought by those Romans. Look at these 20% Dacians who are already speaking it, they look so cool.
      Does it sound logic enough to you?
      I don’t know the truth but I don’t accept the story from today history books. I rather believe that the Dacians were already speaking a sort of Latin or something similar. Where is the evidence that after all, that Latin was invented by the Romans? Just because a history book said that?
      Don’t understand me wrong, I won’t mind to be proven wrong. To come from a great nation as Roman empire is something to be proud of. But something doesn’t adds up.
      I will still search as much as I can and I’m sure the truth is somewhere out there.

    2. You seem very educated, and I respect scholars especially in scientific topics

      How can a presence of only 10,000 soldiers for some 160 years fully rewrite the native language of an occupied territory (partially occupied probably as less as 14%) of a nation? It makes no sense.

      the only logical explanation is that Dacian language shared same roots with Latin

  14. -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.

  15. 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.

  16. 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.

  17. There are also many vlahs in Bulgaria. Especially around the Danube river and most noticeably around the town of Vidin in northwestern Bulgaria. Vidin is my hometown and there are many villages in which the population prefer to speak in Romanian language than in Bulgarian, although they can speak both of them. The Romanian language is very close to the Romanian (let’s say about 70 or maybe 80 % similar to it) My father has many friends in Romania and he can easily converse with them. Can’t wait the bridge across the Danube river between Vidin and Calacorpulent is finished. It will be interesting to visit this country.

    PS. I understand a little bit Romanian but not as good as my father does. I will definitely visit Romania soon.

  18. Of course they’re related. I’m a translator and was a Romance Languages undergrad, with diploma concentration in Italian. But I have to admit even that Romanian is a challenge for me to try to learn to pronounce, and even read, without feeling drained within a couple of minutes. The sounds and complexity/length of words needs some non-native-speaker practice over time, I guess.

    Also, I’d assume that, yes, Romanians can understand Italian, especially because these 2 languages share the southern and eastern Romance Languages characteristics that include, e.g., plurals formed by final vowel(s) alternation, etc. Romanian to the ear sounds very much as if somebody is trying to speak Italian. A Romance Languages reader can usually discern what all these tongues are trying to communicate in print, although I’d say Romanian would be the hardest due to so many influences of words of Balkan origin.

    In my view, Romanian is to the Romance Languages what English is to the Germanic Languages group. Similarly, our English was influenced by a long period of Anglo-Saxon and Norman influences that created a substrate atop the core Germanic vocabulary that English has, as regards fundamental everyday items and customs such as farming, parts of the body, utensils, etc. In the same way, Romanian was greatly influenced through the centuries by its contact with is Slavic and Balkan linguistic and cultural neighbors, besides the case that historically, it may have been the last place inhabited by, and then the first place left behind, by the invading Romans due to its geographical location and isolation.

    PS: I’ll wager it’s more difficult for Italians to understand Romanian with respect to vice-versa, though. This, I believe, is because Italians aren’t as familiar with all the case endings used to express relationship and meaning in Romanian words and sentences–these mostly long-gone from Italian–whereas Italian to Romanians probably sounds a lot like their own language if prepositions were used to draw out basic sentence structure relationships and meanings, instead of their own language’s very productive and highly used case system still in use today.

    1. Interesting comparison with English deviations from Germanic group.

  19. Latin and as a result Italian language comes from Romanian language and not Romanian from Italian. This is the reason why Romanian are able to easily understand other Latin languages because we are the root language.

  20. As someone who learned Portuguese and Spanish I can understand some simple Romanian when written, but from a western Romance perspective Romanian is too diverged from it’s western relatives to make head or tails of it with out studying it. And it’s not just the Slavic words many of Latinate words have shifted meaning so much that I can’t recognize them. I’m sure if I lived in Romania for year I would start to understand thought.

  21. I don’t agree with everything this person as wrote. Yes, Romanian in a Romance language and it’s latin basic, but it is quit different from other Romance languages, because it has been influence by their Slavic neighbors. There is a lot Slavic words in Romanian, and if you listen to it, it not 110% Latin sounding, there are Slavic words, but one has to know what to look for. It doesn’t sound totally like Spanish or Italian. It’s a mix of Latin and Slavic.

    For example Yes is Da, which is the Slavic word for yes. Si in Romanian means And. Iubesc is the Slavic for love. If one isn’t paying close attention, you can mistaken it for being Bulgarian. And the Romanian culture and music is very relatied to the Slavic countries. My Spanish friend who speak Spanish, has a hard time reading and understanding Romanian. Yes, it’s Latin base, but it is very different from other Romance languages.

    1. Lithuanian has “Latin base” (rather some Latin similarity instead) too and it is about 5% Slavic. Eastern European languages, even Albanian (about 2% Slavic) have this Slavic flavour to them.

    2. In the Romanian language for most of the words that come from Slavic there is a sinomin derivation from Latin. For this reason a Romanian can understand more easily an Italian than can an Italian understand a Romanian.

      Example: (you are free two hours if the weather are good.)
      “Poti fii slobod doua ceasuri daca vremea este buna.” – Romanian Slavic
      But the Romanian can formulate also:
      “Poti fii liber doua ore daca timpul este bun.”

      slobod (Slavic Romanian), liber (Latin Romanian)
      ceas (Slavic Romanian), ora (Latin Romanian)
      slobod (Slavic Romanian), liber (Latin Romanian)
      vremea (Slavic Romanian), timp (Latin Romanian)

      poti, fii, doua, este, bun (Latin Romanian)

  22. Hi all,
    I’m Spanish, came to Bucharest for a bussines trip and I’m amazed how similar to Italian it sounds!!
    I don’t speak Italian but can underztand some..
    If I pay atention to the Romanian speaking, can meet some words, less than in Italian though.. but the accent is like 80% the same!!

    ps: I found this blog looking for similarities btwn these 2 langs

    1. Romanian language is about 25% Slavic and 75% Latin and some Gypsy too, and it is unfortunately the ugliest language among Latin languages.

      1. Limba noastra este frumosa. Multi urasc si critica Romania din cauza la media. Pacat ca si pana romani au ajuns sa faca asta. De asta tara o sa isi piarda originalitatea.

    2. I am Italian and I can tell you that I do not understand almost nothing of the Romanian language, while Spanish language is much more similar to Italian. There are some words in Romanian which are clearly of Latin origin, but a full speech is incomprehensible without having studied the Romanian language.

  23. youtube.com/watch?v=EScH031oTfA&feature=youtu.be&t=44m44s

    skip to 44:40

    So Romanians don´t have a ´native´ talent to speak, learn easily other languages, is just something else.

    Romanian is not Latin, is the other way round.

  24. Yes Romanian has its roots in the ancient Latin. The language spoken by the old Romans. There are a few Romanians here who mistakenly believe that Latin comes from the Dacian language. That is simply not true.
    Anyways, as a Latin language, obviously Romanian shares many linguistic characteristics with Italian. And because this language developed in isolation from the western romance languages, it had preserved characteristics of Latin which other languages lost, for example the Latin declension, some of the tense system and a part of the neuter gender are retained in Romanian. There are also some who are commenting that Romanian has Slavic roots. While it is true that Romanian has borrowed many auxiliary words from its neighbors it is still overwhelmingly closer to Latin as opposed to the Slavic languages. Italian linguists have calculated that 75% of the Romanian lexicon is of Latin origin, whilst 20% is of Slavic origin. Phonetically this language sounds closer to Latin then French or Portuguese for example, whist the Italian dialects and Spanish are closest sounding to Latin. In any case, Romanian is a beautiful language for anyone interested in Romance languages, Latin culture and history.

  25. Be proud as Romanians and please don’t try to pass yourselves off as Italians. I have never met so many people of one nationality with such a chip on their shoulders trying to hide it. Romania has about as much in common with Italy as does Ethiopia, sorry at least they were a colony.

    1. Italy and Romania, we are talking of two European countries, both with a Latin language, I think there is a difference with regard to Ethiopia. We try not to be rude and uncivilized, please.

      1. I am from Lituania and I do not think that we are related to Germans or the Russians, so I understand the Italian stand point. Just be yourselves. If WWII and the russkie occupation was to never happen, I think Italians now would be trying to steal the Romanian identity, perhaps.

        1. Even without forty years of communist dictatorship, I don’t see why the Italians should try to “steal” the Romanian identity. In Europe, only the Greeks have a more ancient history than our one.

          1. It was a joke about Italians stealing Romanian identity.

          2. Ah, okay, I didn’t understand, sorry

    2. I am a proud Romanian, proud of my national heritage, proud of my language, proud of my dacian origin, and also proud to be “adopted” by the Roman empire. This nation, praised by the famous historians of the Roman and Greek empire, has been robbed of their history, in the name of politics and petty arguments. No other European nation has endured in 2000 years, what this little country has endured. And still, we kept our culture and our language and our national identity. In spite of massive efforts to destroy this nation done by several empires like the Turks, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Russians, we kept our language and customs and national identity. Now, in 21th century, game as usual, we are called gypsies. But when you come to Romania, surprise, only 3% are gypsies.

  26. The simple proof the Romanians are Romans is the endonym român (from Latin Romanus), meaning that the Romanian people always called themselves “Romans” all over the history (without learning history)

  27. many people wont pick you up off the street but they will bury you
    oameni mai mult, ne’ te’ jumuli strada dar va ingrop in pamant, [romana]
    mnogi ljudi, nece vas pokuputi s ulice ali ce vas zakopati u zemlju [hrvastski]
    molte personne no te’ prendervi la strada ma vi sepelleria nell terra [italiano
    personas muchos costumbre cojale la calle perp te enterare en la tierra [Spanish
    muitas pessoas nao tengo picareta fora da rua mas vai enterrai lo na terra Portu
    beaucoup de gens vous la rue mais ne vous interre dans le sol [francaise]
    sed multis platea sepeliam te’ tollere solent humi [latin]

  28. personas muchos costumbre cojale la calle pero te’ enterare en la tierra
    [espanol] vorbesc asa de prost Spaniola

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