Romanian alphabet

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Romanian alphabet
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	1860s – present
Languages	Romanian
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet Latin alphabet Italian alphabet Romanian alphabet
Unicode
Unicode range	subset of Latin (U+0000...U+024F)
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language. It is a modification of the classical Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters,^[1][2] five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language.

The letters Q (chiu), W (dublu ve), and Y (igrec or i grec, meaning "Greek i") were formally introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words and their Romanian derivatives, such as quasar, watt, and yacht. The letter K, although relatively older, is also rarely used and appears only in proper names and international neologisms such as kilogram, broker, karate.^[3] These four letters are still perceived as foreign, which explains their usage for stylistic purposes in words such as nomenklatură (normally nomenclatură, meaning "nomenclature", but sometimes spelled with k instead of c if referring to members of the Communist leadership in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, as nomenklatura is used in English).^[4]

Most of the <qu> and <y> in learned Latin words (or Greek words via Latin) are replaced by <cv> and <i> respectively (e.g. acvariu "aquarium", oxigen "oxygen"). However, the <y> is retained in ytriu ("yttrium") and yterbiu ("ytterbium"), probably because of the element symbols Y and Yb.

In cases where the word is a direct borrowing having diacritical marks not present in the above alphabet, official spelling tends to favor their use (München, Angoulême etc., as opposed to the use of Istanbul over İstanbul).