Romanian Alphabet: Why ă, â, î, ș and ț Are Not Optional

What does each mark change in a Romanian word?

A Romanian diacritic changes the word, and often its grammar. DOOM 3 (opens in a new tab), the spelling dictionary of the Romanian Academy, sets out the Romanian alphabet and gives a pair of words for each mark. Its glosses are grammatical. The English meanings below come from Wiktionary's entries for apă (opens in a new tab), apa (opens in a new tab), cântă (opens in a new tab), mână (opens in a new tab), râu (opens in a new tab), rău (opens in a new tab), în (opens in a new tab) and in (opens in a new tab).

Mark, as DOOM names it	With the mark	Without it, or with another	What the mark decides
căciula, the cap (a breve)	apă, water	apa, the water	whether the noun has its article
căciula	cântă, sang	cânta, was singing	the tense: simple perfect or imperfect
circumflex, on a	mână, hand	mană, a disease in DOOM's gloss	two unrelated nouns
circumflex against the cap	râu, river	rău, bad	a noun or an adjective
circumflex, on i	în, in	in, flax	a preposition or a noun

Read the first row again. In apă, the cap on the last letter is all that separates "water" from "the water". Romanian puts its definite article at the end of the noun, and here the article is a plain a. Strip the marks and every such noun reads as if it had its article.

DOOM's verdict on Romanian diacritics is short: using them is obligatory. The marks go on capitals too. The comma under ș and ț has a story of its own, a comma and not a cedilla, and the s with accent page tells it. CLDR still lists the cedilla forms ş and ţ among Romanian's auxiliary letters, as the block further down shows.

Why did the Romanian Academy bring back â in 1993?

Because its General Assembly voted for it. On 17 February 1993, the Romanian Academy decided on a return to â and to sunt. DOOM 3's spelling rules (opens in a new tab) set out what followed. The vowel [î] has two letters again: â inside a word and î at its edges. The verb form sunt, I am or they are, replaced sînt. Wiktionary now marks sînt (opens in a new tab) as a dated form.

The rule is not only about position. DOOM sorts the cases in the table below.

Case	Letter	DOOM's examples
inside a word	â	câmp, sfânt, târg, Târgu Jiu
inside a form of a verb that ends in -î	â	coborând, coborât, from a coborî
first letter of a word	î	încă, a începe
last letter of a verb that ends in -î	î	a urî, a hotărî
a compound whose second part starts with î	î	bineînțeles
a Cyrillic ы inside a name or loanword	â	Kolâma, kârgâz
sînt quoted from an older text	â	sânt

Two notes in DOOM explain why you still meet î inside words. The â spelling is compulsory in official publications in Romania, though breaking it there carries no legal sanction. It is compulsory in schools too, where breaking it lowers the mark. Some publishers, institutions and writers keep the older rule of î only. DOOM says Romanian thus uses two spellings at the same time, sometimes in one publication.

The capital  has one more limit.  never starts a word, so DOOM says the capital appears only in words set wholly in capitals, as on a poster. You will see it in ROMÂNIA on a sign, and never at the start of a sentence.

When may a Romanian name or acronym leave out its marks?

Only in two cases that DOOM 3 names. Everywhere else the rule holds, on capitals as on small letters. The table sorts what you may meet in Romanian text, with DOOM's verdict on each.

What you see	DOOM 3's verdict	Example
an ordinary word without its marks	wrong: diacritics are obligatory	apa written for apă
a capital without its mark	wrong: the marks go on capitals too
a family name without marks	allowed, by the family's tradition and the bearer's wish	Hasdeu, said with ș; Sperantia, said with ț
an acronym without marks	allowed in some acronyms, and the reading changes	CSAT, SNSPA; but CNȘT kept its Ș
sh for ș, ts or tz for ț	wrong, though common in electronic messages
ã for ă	wrong, even for graphic effect

The family names are the surprise. DOOM transcribes Hasdeu as [hașdeu] and Densusianu as [densușanu]: the s is written plain and said as ș. It lists other people who write Hașdeu or Speranța in full. So a name without marks may be correct for one person and wrong for another. Ask the bearer, or copy the name from their own papers.

The acronyms work the other way. In CSAT, the Supreme Council for the Defence of the Country, the Ț of Țării becomes a T. DOOM gives two readings, one letter by letter and one as a word, and neither has the ț sound. CNȘT, a former national council for science, kept its Ș.

Are k, q, w and y real letters of the Romanian alphabet?

Yes. DOOM 3's table of the Romanian alphabet lists them in their place. They serve loanwords, foreign proper names and some Romanian names spelled on a foreign model. The Academy recognised q, w and y in 1982, in the first DOOM. K is older: it came in with the Latin alphabet, because the Cyrillic alphabet before it had a k.

DOOM still calls the four letters connoted as foreign. None of them occurs in the old core of Romanian words, so a word with one looks borrowed. K is the best assimilated, helped by kilogram and kilometru. Q is the rarest letter in Romanian. W stays clearly foreign when it ends a word and is said as a short, gliding u. Said as v, as in kiwiul, it needs no special treatment.

Some of these words have older look-alikes written with Romanian letters. DOOM lists pairs that sound alike, or nearly so.

Written with k, q, w or y	Older word with Romanian letters
boy	boi
kit	chit
koala	coala
Qatar	catar
wagon(-lit)	vagon

The pairs show the Romanian way of writing the same sounds: ch for the k sound before i, c before a or o, v for w and i for y.

How do Romanians say the names of their letters?

DOOM 3 gives every letter a name, and most consonants have two or three readings. The Romanian letter names in the table are copied from the dictionary's table of the Romanian alphabet. DOOM notes that a consonant's name does not match its sound. The readings ef, haș, kapa, el, em, en, er, es and zet are used mostly when reading out abbreviations, chemical symbols and units.

Letter	Name in DOOM 3	What the name tells you
ă	ă	a vowel letter is named by its sound
â	î din a, the î of a	the vowel [î], written with a
î	î din i, the î of i	the same vowel, written with i
h	haș or hî	haș is also the reading in abbreviations
k	ka or kapa	kapa is the abbreviation reading
ș	șe or șî
ț	țe or țî
w	dublu ve or dublu vî	double v
y	i grec	the Greek i

The two names for one sound settle a practical question. When you spell a Romanian word aloud, say "î din a" or "î din i". The listener then knows which letter to write, and the 1993 rule above tells you which one the word needs.