About Romanian and Moldovan
Romanian (spoken in Romania) is a Romance language related to Spanish and French, but uses letterssimilar to other languages in Central Europe.
Moldovan (or Moldovan) is a very closely related language spoken in the Republic of Moldava, sometimes written in Cyrilic, but is currently written in the same Western alphabet as Romanian.
Romanian Language Links
- National SEERLC Romanian Webliography
- Romanian Profile (Unravel)
- Romanian Grammar (PDF)
- Wikipedia Romanian Language
Status of Moldovan
In 2013, the Republic of Molodova declared that Romanian and
Moldovan were two names for the same language. The term Romanian was to
be used for official purposes. (Library of Congress News Watch).Some people in Moldova may still use the term Moldovan and there are some dialectal differences. For instance, the 2017 site for the President of Moldova uses the term "Moldovan" on his Moldovan Presidential website. However, the general Modovan Government site uses the term "Romanian."
Moldovan Links
- Moldova: Romanian Recognized as the Official Language
- Moldovan: Latin Script (Wikipedia)
- Moldovan Cyrillic Alphabet
Recommended Fonts
Latin-2 (Central European) Encoding
Although these languages use the Western alphabet, Czech and Slovak includes accented letters (e.g. č, š) which may not be found in all fonts.Note: The term Central European is sometimes used to refer to the languages which use accented letters not common in Western European languages.
Common Fonts
Many common fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Comic Sans, Calibri, Cambria, Palatinto and many more do include these characters.Third Party Fonts
Below are some additional third party Unicode fonts which include Central European characters.- SIL Fonts – The SIL has created multiple fonts with IPA characters including:
- Andika – Designed for new readers. It could be suitable for some students with reading disorders.
- Doulos SIL – Includes Greek, Cyrillic
- Charis SIL – Font family and includes Greek, Cyrillic
- Gentium – From SIL. Very readable
- Quivira – Modelled on Garamond and includes ancient language, basic Cyrillic/Armenian/Georgian and math/astronomical symbols.
Typing Romanian
Windows
Microsoft provides keyboard utilities for Central European languages which allow you to type Central European Characters.Note: Neither the Windows International
Keyboard or ALT code repertoire includes Central European characters.
- See detailed keyboard activation instructions for different versions of the Windows operating system.
- To see where the critical keys are, go to the Microsoft Keyboard Layouts Page.
- You can also input characters from the Character Map. This can be useful if you only need to insert characters into only a few words.
Macintosh
Extended Keyboard Codes
You can activate the Extended Keyboard to input Central European characters.| ACCENT | SAMPLE | TEMPLATE |
|---|---|---|
| Breve | ă, Ă | Option+B, V |
| Cedille | ş, Ş | Option+C, C |
| Circumflex | â, Â | Option+6, V |
Example 2: To input the capital Ŏ, hold down the Option key, then the B key. Release all three keys then type capital O.
Romanian Mac Keyboard Utilities
Apple also has keyboard utilities for most Central European languages. See instructions for activating a Macintosh keyboard for more details.Web Development Romanian Encoding
Test Sites
If you have your browser configured correctly, the Web sites below should displaythe correct characters.
Note: If a site displays gibberish, see the Browser Setup page for debugging information.
- Romania: Guvernul României (Romanian Government)
- Moldova: Preşedinţia Republicii Moldova (President of Moldova)
should display Central European letters.
Historical Encodings
Unicode (utf-8) is the preferred encoding for Web sites. However, the following historic encodings may still be encountered.win-1250(aka "Windows Encoding")iso-8859-2(aka "Latin-2")iso-8859-1(Latin 1 w/ alternate spelling) – AVOID
Language Tags
Language Tags allow browsers and other software to process Polish text more efficiently. The following lists codes for Polish and minority languages closely related to Polish.ro(Romanian)ro-RO(Romanian as used in Romania)ro-MD(Romanian as used in Moldova)mo(Moldovan DEPRECATED)
Status of mo Language Code
The code mo was officially deprecated in November 3, 2008. However, it still may be used in some contexts. For instance, there is an archived Wikipedia page mo.wikipedia.org (Moldovan Wikipedia) which was written in the Cyrillic alphabet. In contrast ro.wikepedia.org (Romanian Wikipedia) is written in the Western Latin alphabet.
Inserting Unicode Character Codes for HTML
The HTML Entity Codes
Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you wantto type două you would type două
Be sure the appropriate Encodings and Language Tags are used.
NOTE: Because these are Unicode characters, the formatting may not exactly match that of the surrounding text depending on the browser.
| Vwl | Entity Code |
|---|---|
| Â | Â (194) |
| â | â (226) |
| Ă | Ă Capital A breve |
| ă | ă Lower A breve |
| Î | Î (206) |
| î | î (238) |
| Cns | Cedille Consonants |
|---|---|
| Ş | Ş Capital S cedille |
| ş | ş Lower Scedille |
| Ţ | Ţ Capital T cedille |
| ţ | ţ Lower T cedille |
European Quote Marks
Many modern texts use American style quotes, but if you wish to include European style quote marks, here are the codes. Note that these codes may not work in older browsers.| Sym | HTMl Entity Code |
|---|---|
| « | « (left angle) |
| » | » (right angle) |
| ‹ | ‹ (left single angle) |
| › | › (right single angle) |
| „ | „(bottom quote) |
| ‚ | ‚(single bottom quote) |
| “ | “(left curly quote) |
| ‘ | ‘(left single curly quote) |
| ” | ”(right curly quote) |
| ’ | ’(right single curly quote) |
| – | – (en dash) |
| — | — (em dash) |
Romanian Language Links
- National SEERLC Romanian Webliography
- Romanian Profile (Unravel)
- Romanian Grammar (PDF)
- Wikipedia Romanian Language
Moldovan
- Moldova: Romanian Recognized as the Official Language
- Moldovan: Latin Script (Wikipedia)
- Moldovan Cyrillic Alphabet
Posts
