Romanian alphabet

The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language. It consists of 31 letters, five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language.

The letters Q (chiu), W (dublu ve), and Y (igrec or i grec, meaning "Greek i") were formally introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words and their Romanian derivatives, such as quasar, watt, and yoga. The letter K, although relatively older, is also rarely used and appears only in proper names and international neologisms such as kilogram, broker, karate. These four letters are still perceived as foreign, which explains their usage for stylistic purposes in words such as nomenklatură (normally nomenclatură, meaning "nomenclature", but sometimes spelled with k instead of c if referring to members of the Communist leadership in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, as nomenklatura is used in English).

Most of the <qu> and <y> in learned Latin words (or Greek words via Latin) are replaced by <cu/cv> and <i> respectively (e.g. ecuație "equation", acvariu "aquarium", oxigen "oxygen"). However, the <y> is retained in ytriu ("yttrium") and yterbiu ("ytterbium"), probably because of the element symbols Y and Yb.

In cases where the word is a direct borrowing having diacritical marks not present in the above alphabet, official spelling tends to favor their use (München, Angoulême etc., as opposed to the use of Istanbul over İstanbul).

Romanian spelling is mostly phonemic without silent letters (but see i). The table below gives the correspondence between letters and sounds. Some of the letters have several possible readings, even if allophones are not taken into account. When vowels /i/, /u/, /e/, and /o/ are changed into their corresponding semivowels, this is not marked in writing. Letters K, Q, W, and Y appear only in foreign borrowings; the pronunciation of W and Y and of the combination QU depends on the origin of the word they appear in.

^* See Comma-below (ș and ț) versus cedilla (ş and ţ).

Romanian orthography does not use accents or diacritics – these are secondary symbols added to letters (i.e. basic glyphs) to alter their pronunciation or to distinguish between words. There are, however, five special letters in the Romanian alphabet (associated with four different sounds) which are formed by modifying other Latin letters; strictly speaking these letters function as basic glyphs in their own right rather than letters with diacritical marks, but they are often referred to as the latter.

The letter â is used exclusively in the middle of words; its majuscule version appears only in all-capitals inscriptions.