Indo-European · ISO 639-3 ron · ro
Romanian Language română
Romanian is an Indo-European language spoken by about 24 million people in 8 countries. It is an official language of Romania and Moldova. It is written in the Latin script.
Where Romanian is spoken
- Official language
- Regional official
- Spoken by 10%+
- 1–10%
- Smaller communities
Countries that speak Romanian
Language family
- Indo-European
- Classical Indo-European
- Italic
- Latino-Faliscan
- Latinic
- Imperial Latin
- Romance
- Eastern Romance
- Northern Romanian
- Eastern Romanian
- Romanian
Writing system
Latin script
Related languages
About the Romanian language
Romanian (română) is spoken by about 24 million people, which makes it the 63rd most spoken language in the world — just behind Antankarana Malagasy (25 million) and ahead of Dutch (24 million). It belongs to the Indo-European language family and, more precisely, to the Eastern Romanian group within the Italic branch.
Where is Romanian spoken?
Romanian is used in 8 countries. The largest communities live in Romania (16 million), Moldova (2.3 million), United Kingdom (547,672), Israel (347,896) and Ukraine (185,441). More than half of the population speaks it in Romania and Moldova — the places where travellers will hear it everywhere.
Share of the population that speaks Romanian: Romania 90% (16 million), Moldova 63% (2.3 million), United Kingdom 0.8% (547,672), Israel 3.7% (347,896), Ukraine 0.5% (185,441) and Serbia 2.1% (139,696).
Romanian is an official language in 2 countries: Romania and Moldova. It also has regional official status in Serbia.
Writing system and status
Romanian is written in the Latin script. It is a safe, widely transmitted language: children still learn it at home as their first language.
Its closest relatives in the same branch of the family are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Haitian, Catalan and 2 more.
ISO codes: ISO 639-1 ro, ISO 639-3 ron.
Frequently asked questions about Romanian
How many people speak Romanian?
Where is Romanian spoken?
In which countries is Romanian an official language?
What language family does Romanian belong to?
What is Romanian called in Romanian?
Is Romanian an endangered language?
Data: Languages of the World dataset (MIT) — ISO 639-3, Glottolog (CC BY 4.0), Unicode CLDR, Google LinguaMeta (CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata; country lists: samayo/country-json (MIT). Speaker numbers include first- and second-language speakers where sources report them.