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Romanian alphabet

Romanian language is basically the latin alphabet with five additional diacriticals:

Ă ă - a with breve
 â - a with circumflex
Î î - i with circumflex
Ş ş - s with cedilla
Ţ ţ - t with comma

The letters î and â are both phonetically and functionally identical. The reason for using both î and â is historical, denoting the language's Latin origin. During Nicolae Ceauşescu's regime, the Romanian government largely eliminated the letter â, replacing it with î everywhere except for the name of the country, which remained România. For example, the Latin angelus (angel) became the Romanian ânger, but today it's spelled înger.

After the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, the Romanian Academy decided to reintroduce â. However, most of the population had only learned î spellings, so the Academy proposed a new set of rules for it. The choice between î and â is currently based on a simple rule: the letter is always spelled as â, except at the beginning and the end of words where î is used instead. Exceptions:

• Proper nouns where the usage of the letters is frozen, whichever it may be (so don't apply the rule above to your Romanian friends' names, copy the name as you see it written);
• The components of portmanteau words are each subjected to the rule above, not the resulting word itself (e.g. ne+îndemânatic => neîndemânatic, not *neândemânatic).

Writing letters /S/ and /ts/ with a cedilla instead of a comma is incorrect, but widespread, especially in computer environments, where cedilla is used in almost all cases.

The preferred form is with comma below. (Note that not all computer systems can properly render these "comma-below" characters. However, they are included as special Romanian Unicode characters in the Unicode standard and in ISO 8859-16.)

Here are the letters of the Romanian alphabet, and their pronunciation.

Letter	Phoneme	Pronunciation
A a	/a/	Like in 'Mars'
Ă ă (a with breve)	/@/	Schwa: first sound of above
 â (a with circumflex)	/1/	No equivalent in English ы in Russian, ı in Turkish
B b	/b/
C c	/k/	Like in 'cat'
D d	/d/
E e	/e/	Like in 'merry'
F f	/f/
G g	/g/	Like in 'goat'
H h	/h/	Like in 'house'
I i	/i/	Like in 'machine'
Î î (i with circumflex)	/1/	the same as â
J j	/Z/	Like French 'j': 'jour'
K k	/k/
L l	/l/	Like in 'lamp'
M m	/m/
N n	/n/
O o	/o/	Like in 'door'
P p	/p/
R r	/r/	Trilled - like Italian, Spanish 'r'
S s	/s/
Ș ș (s with comma) (also with cedilla: Ş ş)	/S/	like in sheep
T t	/t/
Ţ ţ (t with comma) (also with cedilla: Ț ț)	/ts/	like in nuts
U u	/u/	Like in 'group'
V v	/v/
X x	/ks/
Z z	/z/

When authoring HTML that uses the more unusual Romanian characters, the following information may be useful:

Upper case	Lower case	Upper case encoding	Lower case encoding	Notes
Ă	ă	Ă	ă
Â	â	Â	â
Î	î	Î	î
Ș	ș	&amp#x218;	&amp#x219;	s with comma, more correct, but not widely supported
Ş	ş	Ş	ş	s with cedilla, considered less correct
Ţ	ţ	Ţ	ţ	t with comma, more correct, but not widely supported
Ț	ț	&amp#x21A;	&amp#x21B;	t with cedilla, considered less correct