World Language Map

Where is Romanian spoken?

Romanian (românește) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Romania, Moldova, the United Kingdom, Israel and 5 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Romanian is spoken

Romanian is spoken in 9 countries: Romania, Moldova, the United Kingdom, Israel and 5 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Romania90%16,333,380
Moldova63%2,267,704
United Kingdom0.8%547,673
Israel3.7%347,897
Ukraine0.5%185,441
Serbia2.1%139,696
Canada0.3%124,143
Hungary1%97,572
BulgariaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Romanian is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Romanian.

How many people speak Romanian?

Wikidata gives about 24.3 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Romanian sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Romanian as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Italic
  4. Latino-Faliscan
  5. Latinic
  6. Imperial Latin
  7. Romance
  8. Eastern Romance
  9. Northern Romanian
  10. Eastern Romanian
  11. Romanian

Related languages

Other languages in the Eastern Romanian group:

More about Romanian

Codes: ISO 639-3 ron, Glottolog roma1327. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Romanian is a Romance language, descended from Latin. Latin’s footprint: the Roman Empire at its height → Latin spread along Roman roads →

Questions about Romanian

Where is Romanian spoken?

Romanian is spoken in Romania, Moldova, the United Kingdom, Israel and 5 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 90% of the population of Romania, which is about 16,333,380 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Romanian?

Wikidata gives about 24.3 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Romanian in?

Glottolog places Romanian in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Eastern Romance, Northern Romanian and Eastern Romanian.

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