Romanian phonology

In the phonology of the Romanian language, the phoneme inventory consists of seven vowels, two or four semivowels (different views exist), and twenty consonants. In addition, as with all languages, other phonemes can occur occasionally in interjections or recent borrowings.

Notable features of Romanian include two unusual diphthongs /e̯a/ and /o̯a/ and the central vowel /ɨ/.

There are seven monophthongs in Romanian:

The table below gives a series of word examples for each vowel.

Although most of these vowels are relatively straightforward and similar or identical to those in many other languages, the close central unrounded vowel /ɨ/ is uncommon as a phoneme and especially uncommon amongst Indo-European languages.

Word-final /o/ is rare except for acolo /aˈko.lo/, and loanwords such as audio and video.

According to Sarlin (2014), /ə/ is phonetically open-mid somewhat retracted central [ɜ̠], rather than mid central.

In addition to the seven core vowels, in a number of words of foreign origin (predominantly French, but also German) the mid front rounded vowel /ø/ (rounded Romanian /e/; example word: bleu /blø/ 'light blue') and the mid central rounded vowel /ɵ/ (rounded Romanian /ə/; example word: chemin de fer /ʃɵˌmen dɵ ˈfer/ 'Chemin de Fer') have been preserved, without replacing them with any of the existing phonemes. The borrowed words have become part of the Romanian vocabulary and follow the usual inflexion rules, so that the new vowels, though less common, could be considered as part of the Romanian phoneme set. Romanian dictionaries use ⟨ö⟩ in their phonetic descriptions to represent both vowels, which suggests that they may be actually pronounced identically by Romanian speakers.

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