Michael Helten

Language Sketch Romanian Michael Helten

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, State University of New York at Stony Brook (Linguistics), course: Phonetics, 5 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: Double spaced. I give an overview over the phonetics of Romanian. I sketch the vowel and the consonant system and give details on Romanian syllable structure, phoneme distribution, stress patterns, intonation etc. , abstract: Romanian is a Romance language, and as such part of the Indo-European language family. This language sketch will make an attempt at outlining Daco-Romanian. Daco- Romanian is one of four types of Balkan Romance, and among these it is by far the mostspoken - Daco-Romanian (hereafter referred to as Romanian again for reasons of simplicity) has some 21 million speakers, most of whom live in today's Romania and Moldavia, while the other three types are spoken by only a few thousand speakers each. Romanian itself has two principal dialects, Moldavian and Muntenian. The latter is the one that underlies the literary language that developed in the 18th century and it is based on the language spoken in Bucharest, and it is also the dialect this phonetic approach will come closest to.