Romanian language
The Romanian language (limba română) is a Romance or Romanic language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. It has much in common with languages such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and French. It is also related to some Italian dialects, e.g., Friulian, Galician, Genoese, Lombard, Occitan, Piedmontese, Sardinian, Sicilian, Venetian, and other languages written in Latin alphabet. In addition, Romanian language also contains many words taken from the surrounding Slavic languages, Old Church Slavonic, German, Greek and Turkish.

Romenian is spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania (România) and Moldova with official status in Romania, Moldova and the Autonomous Province of Voievodina in Serbia. It is also an official or administrative language in various communities and organizations such as the Latin Union and the European Union.
The ancient territory of Romania was inhabited by the Dacians, an Indo-European people. After the war with the Romans in 106, a part of Dacia (Oltenia, Banat and Transilvania regions) became a Roman province. There is obvious evidence of Roman colonization for about the next 200 years. The common (vulgar) Latin was used in administration and commerce. The Romanian language seems to have been unified between the 7th and the 10th century when there was an important Greek and Slavonic influence.

In a general sense the term ‘Romanian’ envelopes four mutually intelligible speech varieties commonly regarded as dialects. These four dialects are thought to have appeared in the territories to the north and the south of the Danube which are thought to have appeared at the north and south of the Danube. All these four dialects are offsprings of the Romance language spoken both in the northern and southern Danube before the settlement of the Slavonian tribes in the south of the river, Daco-Romanians in the North and the other three (Aromanian/ Macedo-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian) in the South.

The language spoken in the territory of todays Romania is Daco-Romanian. This is a dialect continuum with some varieties (‘spechees’ means ‘graiuri’)which have small differences in some dozen regional words and some phonetic changes.

Some general pronunciation rules:
ă is pronounced like the first sound in “above”
ş is pronounced like “sh” in “ship”
ţ is pronounced like “ts” in “nuts”
ge like “ge” in “gentle”
gi like “gi” in “gin”
ghe like ”ge” in “get”
ghi like “gui” in “guitar”
ce like “tche” in “hatchet”
ci like “tchi” in “sketching”
che like “ke” in “kerosene”
chi like “ki” in “kimono”