Editorial: Romanian Language Day - how many people speak the language?

Romania celebrates on August 31 the Romanian Language Day. This day was declared a national holiday in 2013, following a decision of the Romanian Parliament. The Romanian Language Day is also celebrated in the Republic of Moldova.

The Romanian language is a Romanic language, from the same family as French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan. Some 60% of the words in the base vocabulary of the Romanian language come from Latin.

The Romanian Language Day is also an occasion for Romanian politicians and academics to talk about its importance. This year, a statement of the Romanian Academy president raised an important question. “Of the 6,000-7,000 languages spoken on our planet, Romanian is – based on objective criteria, set by non-Romanians – among the first 15-20, which is not little,” Romanian Academy president Ioan-Aurel Pop, told Agerpres. He didn’t elaborate on this, so there’s no way of knowing what those “objective criteria” are.

However, the statement raises an interesting question: what is the Romanian language’s place among the languages spoken worldwide?

The most objective criterion by which languages can be “ranked” is the number of people using them. A ranking of the world’s languages by the number of native speakers, based on the 2019 edition of Ethologue, an international reference in the field, places Romanian as the 42nd language with most native speakers in the world, with 24.3 million native speakers. According to Ethologue, there are 18.7 million native speakers in Romania, 2.18 million in the Republic of Moldova, 328,000 in Ukraine, 250,000 in Israel, 29,000 in Serbia and almost 14,000 in Hungary.

The 20th language with most native speakers in this ranking is Urdu, in Pakistan, with 68.6 million users, almost three times more than Romanian native speakers. For comparison, Italian is only 22nd in this ranking, with 64.8 million native speakers.

However, other statistics show that Romanian has more native speakers than the figure estimated by Ethologue. According to the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) Madrid website, Romanian is the mother tongue for approximately 28 million people. It is the state language in Romania and Moldova, an official and administrative language in the European Union, and a minority language for familial and local use in Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine and Hungary. Moreover, the language is studies as a foreign language in approximately 40 countries.

Even so, the 28 million speakers are less than half than what it would take for Romanian to be in the top 20.