What I love about Romania: The language, a mix of Latin and Balkan influences

Guest Writer Yvette Larsson covers yet another thing she loves about Romania: its language. I am a language person. I’m a native Swedish speaker, I manage Norwegian and Danish too. English and French come easy for me. I also understand a bit Dutch and Spanish. I’d say I’m an eager language learner. - Why ? Because I believe learning languages is a door into the culture of a people. You get under the skin. When you understand jokes from another culture, you know you've come a long way. When I tell people here, in Scandinavia, that the Romanian language is a Latin based language many are surprised. Usually we associate Latin languages with Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The fact that Romanian belongs to the Latin language -family intrigues people outside Romania. We believe easily that Romanian is a purely Slavic language as Romania is squeezed into the Balkans. It doesn’t help either that Romanian is a language not widely heard. It’s not heard because Romania is not on the common travel circuit for foreign tourists. I remember the first time I was in Romania in 1985, as a 13 year old, and hearing the language, I thought it sounded like a mix of Italian and Russian. Last week, when I visited Romania with my tri-lingual children, I asked my five year old daughter, Emma : “What does Romanian sound like?” She said , in a child’s way : “ Spanish and Elena’s language” . Elena is our baby-sitter and she is from Ukraine. So, my daughter had a similar first experience to me, with regards to the Romanian language. A Latin language with Slavic overtones. I think that is the core of Romania. It is eclectic. That’s one, big strength. Romanian is spoken by around 24 million people , as a native language, and by another 4 million people as a second language. Visually, the language looks like a mix of Latin and Slavic, to me. The words often resembles Latin and I wonder how close Romanian is to old Latin, compared to Italian. In October I took Romanian lessons with Violeta Ieremie, from Scrie Bine. She introduced me to the language in a structured way. She told me about the “diacritice” , that were so difficult for me to pronounce in the beginning. She showed me words with three vowels connected , for example : ceai and copiii. I believe that it is the abundance of vowels that makes Romanian sound like a flowing river to me. It was a friend who first used those words “ flowing like a river”. Romanian is a melodic language and I can’t wait for the day when I can read Eminescu in Romanian. By Yvette Larsson, Guest Writer Yvette Larsson is Swedish, born 1972 in Gällivare, Lapland. Between the years 1991- 1998 she studied English, Swedish, Education, Media & Communication and Science Journalism at the University of Umeå.