Background

Language Family: Indo-European / Italic / Romance / Eastern Romance / Balkan Romance / Romanian

Romanian is predominantly spoken in Romania and Moldova, but in other countries as well.

Phonology

Consonants

There is some debate regarding the existence of palatal consonants as phonemes. Petrovici (1950; as cited in Dézsi 2008, 439) includes them, but he also includes labialized and labio-palatalized consonants which proves too elaborate an analysis, as stated by Dézsi (2008) (p. 440). Dézsi (2008) states that palatalization is predictable (morphologically conditioned), with /i/ surfacing as such a marker [ʲ] (p. 447; Renwick 2012, 81).
Dézsi (2008) explains that the phonemic attestation of /j/ and /w/ is rather unclear, given the lack of analysis (p. 438). Chitoran (2002; as cited in Dézsi 2008, 441) states that the [j] is a surface realization of /i/. Dézsi (2008) seems to support this analysis (p. 447). I have chosen not to include /j/ and /w/ below.

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Dental	Postalveolar	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t̪ d̪		k ɡ
Affricates		t̪s	tʃ dʒ
Fricatives	f v	s̪ z̪	ʃ ʒ		h
Nasals	m	n̪
Trills		r̪
Approximants		l̪
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

Although Romanian has frequent vowel sequences (constituting possible diphthongs and triphthongs), only the ones listed below are always considered as complex nuclei (Renwick 2012, 438).
Several sources use /ə/ to represent the mid-central vowel (Dézsi 2008, 438; Chitoran 2002, 208); however, Renwick (2012) explains that the vowel for which this phoneme represents is not reduced, and shouldn’t be treated as such. He opts for /ʌ/, but I have chosen to use /ɜ/ as it’s more central.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i	ɨ	u
Mid	e	ɜ	o
Low		a

Diphthongs
/ea/, /oa/

Alphabet

In the sequences ⟨c(i/e)⟩, ⟨g(i/e)⟩, ⟨ch(i/e)⟩, and ⟨gh(i/e)⟩, the front vowels may or may not be transcribed. M. A. Ordean et al. (2009) breaks down the environments in which they’re transcribed (p. 403). I have included these rules in the rule set.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
ă	/ɜ/
â	/ɨ/
b	/b/
c	/k/; /tʃ/	/tʃ/: preceding front vowels
d	/d̪/
e	/e/
f	/f/
g	/ɡ/; /dʒ/	/dʒ/: preceding front vowels
h	/h/
i	/i/
î	/ɨ/
j	/ʒ/
k	/k/	appears in loanwords
l	/l̪/
m	/m/
n	/n̪/
o	/o/
p	/p/
q	/k/	appears in loanwords
r	/r̪/
s	/s̪/
ș	/ʃ/
t	/t̪/
ț	/t̪s/
u	/u/
v	/v/
w	/v/	appears in loanwords
x	/ks̪/
y	/i/	appears in loanwords
z	/z̪/
Digraph
ea	/ea/
oa	/oa/
ch	/k/	preceding front vowels (Dindelegan 2013, 14)
gh	/ɡ/	preceding front vowels (ibid.)

Lenition Rules

In spontaneous speech, consonant deletion occurs (Chitoran, n.d., 1).

References

Chitoran, Ioana. 2002. “The Phonology and Morphology of Romanian Diphthongization.” Probus 14 (2). Walter de Gruyter GmbH. doi:10.1515/prbs.2002.009.

———. n.d. “Connected Speech, Phonetic Variation, and Sound Change: A Cross-Romance Typology.”

Dézsi, Melinda. 2008. “The Morphology of Romanian Palatalization.” Verbum 10 (2). Akademiai Kiado Zrt.: 437–48. doi:10.1556/verb.10.2008.2.11.

Dindelegan, Gabriela Pana. 2013. The Grammar of Romanian. PAPERBACKSHOP UK IMPORT. https://www.ebook.de/de/product/19324755/gabriela_pana_dindelegan_the_grammar_of_romanian.html.

Ordean, Mihai Alexandru, Andrei Saupe, Mihaela Ordean, Melania Duma, and Gheorghe Cosmin Silaghi. 2009. “Enhanced Rule-Based Phonetic Transcription for the Romanian Language.” In 2009 11th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing. IEEE. doi:10.1109/synasc.2009.18.

Petrovici, E. 1950. “Corelatia de Timbru a Consoanelor Dure Si Moi in Limba Română.” Studii și Cercetări Lingvistice.

Renwick, Margaret Elspeth Lambert. 2012. “Vowels of Romanian: Historical, Phonological and Phonetic Studies.” PhD thesis, Cornell University.

Romanian