Official name

România (Romania). For the proper pronunciation see language note below.

Area & Population

	Clickable Map of Romania

Romania covers an area of 238,000 km² (almost as big as the UK or Michigan)

The population is around 22.3 million^* (2003) - (around 1/3 of the UK population).

Slightly less than 90% are Romanians, 6.5 % Hungarians, 2.5 % Roma (there's a huge gap between official and unofficial figures!), furthermore there are German, Ukrainian, Russian, Turk and other minorities.^*

Religion

Corresponding to the ethnic share: almost 90% are Romanian-Orthodox, others include Greek-Orthodox, Catholic, Protestants etc.

Time zone

As in middle Europe: GMT +01 hr, with daylight-saving time (+1 hour) in summer.

^*Source: CIA World Factbook   

Romanian. As the attentive reader already might have assumed, the language derives from Latin. From a Latin dialect, to be exactly. However, the language was greatly influenced by other, mostly Slavic languages (example: the word for 'yes' is 'da' - same as in Russian). Nevertheless, knowing a Slavic language, eg Russian or Czech, doesn't help at all in Romania. A good knowledge of French or Italian is definitely more helpful. Many young people speak English fairly well, some even excellent. But personally I've got the impression that German is much more common. Romanian uses Latin script, but there are some diacritical marks: â, ă, î, ş and ţ.

• ă is read as the weak [e] in [ the ] (phon: ə)
• â is read as a weak, almost nasal [ i ]. Close to the [ i ] in [nifty] (phon: ɨ, i ).
• î Practically the same as â
• ţ is pronounced as the [ ts ] in [ tsar ]
• ş as the [ sh ] in [ rush ].
• gh is mostly read as the [ g ] in [ leg ].

cezar wrote:

English is the most common. German just in Transilvania, some parts.

Posted by cezar on December 22, 2009 00:11