Romanian phonology

This article discusses the phonology of the Romanian language. For other details on this language (history, grammar) the reader is referred to that article.

The phoneme inventory of Romanian consists of seven vowels, two or four semivowels (different views exist), and twenty consonants. In addition, as with all languages, other phonemes can occur occasionally in interjections or recent borrowings.

Notable features of Romanian include two unusual diphthongs and and the central vowel .

Vowels

There are seven monophthongs in Romanian:



Although , are written above with diacritics to show their mid height and with a diacritic to show its central backness, in virtually all phonetic transcriptions of Romanian these characteristics are implied and the symbols are written without diacritics. The same convention is applied in this article.

The table below gives a series of word examples for each vowel.

While most of these vowels are relatively straightforward and similar or identical to those in many other languages, the close central unrounded vowel is uncommon as a phoneme and especially uncommon amongst Indo-European languages.

Less frequent vowels

ö

In addition to the seven core vowels, in a number of words of foreign origin (predominantly French, but also German) the close-mid front rounded vowel , the open-mid front rounded vowel , and the......
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