The Romanian alphabet: 31 letters, ă â î ș ț and how to read them

The Romanian alphabet has 31 letters: the 26 you know from English plus five with marks — ă, â, î, ș and ț. Once you know those five and two small rules about c and g, Romanian spelling is a reliable guide to pronunciation. This guide walks through every letter with real words checked in Wiktionary. To see how much you already know, try the free Romanian level test.

Updated November 14, 2026 · 5 min read

Romanian at a glance

Article 13 of the Constitution of Romania says: “In Romania, the official language is Romanian.” Article 32 also protects the right of national minorities to learn their mother tongue. Romanian is a Romance language, a relative of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French, which is why many of its words look familiar — compare our guides to the history of French and to where Latin lives today.

All 31 letters

In alphabetical order, as Wiktionary lists them:

Note the order: ă and â come straight after a, î after i, ș after s and ț after t. A dictionary therefore lists ăsta after every word in plain a. The letters K, Q, W and Y are part of the alphabet too.

The five letters with diacritics

Sounds and examples come from Wiktionary's Romanian pronunciation appendix and its word entries; the English comparisons are rough guides of our own. The appendix places înspre (towards) and cârnat (sausage) in the same row, /ɨ/: â and î spell one sound. Which letter a word uses is a spelling matter — compare înainte with pâine — so learn each word with its spelling.

Why ș and ț need a comma, not a cedilla

The correct Romanian letters have a small comma below: ș and ț. For years computers offered only the Turkish-style letters with a cedilla (ş, ţ). Wiktionary's entry for ș notes that it was typed as ş until Unicode 3 and Windows XP became mainstream in the mid-2000s. The Unicode Standard now says the comma-below letters are the preferred form for Romanian, that a lot of Romanian text still contains the cedilla forms, and that software should treat the two as equivalent. If your keyboard offers both, choose the comma.

C and G: the two rules that matter most

Like Italian, Romanian changes the sound of c and g before e and i, and adds an h to keep them hard:

If you already read Italian, this will feel familiar — the Italian level test is a good way to check how much carries over.

Vowel pairs: ea, oa and a short final i

• ea is one syllable, an e gliding into a: gheață /ˈɡe̯at͡sə/, cireașă /t͡ʃiˈre̯a.ʃə/.
• oa is one syllable, an o gliding into a: școală /ˈʃko̯a.lə/.
• A final i after a consonant is often not a full vowel: Wiktionary transcribes ochi (eye) as /okʲ/, one syllable, with only a softening of the k. Check the transcription when a word ends in -i.

The other letters

Most remaining letters sound as an English reader would guess. Two to watch: j is /ʒ/, the sound in “vision”, and h is always pronounced, /h/.

Twelve words to practise reading

Notice română and România: the same /ɨ/ sound, written with â in both (see Wiktionary: română). Read each word aloud, then cover the IPA column and try again.

Tips for reading Romanian

Our advice, not a rule: learn ă, â/î, ș and ț on day one; then drill ce/ci versus che/chi and ge/gi versus ghe/ghi with a short list of words; and set up your keyboard with the comma-below letters from the start so you never learn the cedilla habit. Speakers of Spanish, Portuguese or French will recognise many roots; Latin learners even more — try the Latin level test.

Other alphabets with marks on Latin letters are explained in our guides to the Azerbaijani alphabet and Serbian's two alphabets; for a different script, see the Russian alphabet or the Georgian alphabet. Moving to a Romance-speaking country? Compare Italian citizenship B1, Spanish nationality, Portuguese nationality and other language exams for citizenship.

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