{"history":[],"article":{"id":"cab1e244-0e50-46c8-bca9-e2fcca43e785","title":"Romanian alphabet","slug":"romanian-alphabet","content":":::summary\n**Name:** Romanian alphabet \n**Type:** [Alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/alphabet) \n**Languages:** [Romanian](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-language) \n**Time:** 1860s – present \n**Fam 1:** [Egyptian hieroglyphs](https://bliptext.com/articles/egyptian-hieroglyphs) \n**Fam 2:** [Proto-Sinaitic](https://bliptext.com/articles/proto-sinaitic) \n**Fam 3:** [Phoenician alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/phoenician-alphabet) \n**Fam 4:** [Greek alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/greek-alphabet) \n**Fam 5:** [Latin alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-script) \n**Fam 6:** [Italian alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-alphabet) \n**Unicode:** subset of [Latin (U+0000...U+024F)](https://bliptext.com/articles/unicode-latin) \n**Sample:** Romanian alphabet.svg \n**Imagesize:** 300px \n:::\n\n# \nThe **Romanian alphabet** is a variant of the [Latin alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-alphabet) used for writing the [Romanian language](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-language).\nIt is a modification of the [classical Latin alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/classical-latin-alphabet) and consists of 31 letters, five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language.\nThe letters Q (chiu), W (dublu ve), and Y (igrec or i grec, meaning \"Greek i\") were formally introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier.\nThey occur only in foreign words and their Romanian derivatives, such as [quasar](https://bliptext.com/articles/quasar), [watt](https://bliptext.com/articles/watt), and [yacht](https://bliptext.com/articles/yacht).\nThe letter K, although relatively older, is also rarely used and appears only in proper names and international neologisms such as kilogram, broker, karate.\nThese four letters are still perceived as foreign, which explains their usage for stylistic purposes in words such as nomenklatură (normally nomenclatură, meaning \"nomenclature\", but sometimes spelled with k instead of c if referring to members of the Communist leadership in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, as [nomenklatura](https://bliptext.com/articles/nomenklatura) is used in English).\nMost of the and in learned Latin words (or Greek words via Latin) are replaced by and respectively (e.g. acvariu \"aquarium\", oxigen \"oxygen\").\nHowever, the is retained in ytriu (\"yttrium\") and yterbiu (\"ytterbium\"), probably because of the element symbols Y and Yb.\nIn cases where the word is a direct borrowing having diacritical marks not present in the above alphabet, official spelling tends to favor their use ([München](https://bliptext.com/articles/m-nchen), [Angoulême](https://bliptext.com/articles/angoul-me) etc., as opposed to the use of [Istanbul](https://bliptext.com/articles/istanbul) over İstanbul).\n\n# Letters and their pronunciation\nRomanian spelling is mostly phonemic without silent letters (but see i).\nThe table below gives the correspondence between letters and sounds.\nSome of the letters have several possible readings, even if [allophones](https://bliptext.com/articles/allophone) are not taken into account.\nWhen vowels, , , and are changed into their corresponding [semivowels](https://bliptext.com/articles/semivowel), this is not marked in writing.\nLetters K, Q, W, and Y appear only in foreign borrowings; the pronunciation of W and Y and of the combination QU depends on the origin of the word they appear in.\n\n# Special letters\nRomanian [orthography](https://bliptext.com/articles/orthography) does not use accents or [diacritics](https://bliptext.com/articles/diacritic) – these are secondary symbols added to letters (i.e. basic [glyphs](https://bliptext.com/articles/glyph)) to alter their pronunciation or to distinguish between words.\nThere are, however, five special letters in the Romanian alphabet (associated with four different sounds) which are formed by modifying other Latin letters; strictly speaking these letters function as basic glyphs in their own right rather than letters with diacritical marks, but they are often referred to as the latter.\nThe letter â is used exclusively in the middle of words; its [majuscule](https://bliptext.com/articles/majuscule) version appears only in all-capitals inscriptions.\nWriting letters ș and ț with a cedilla instead of a comma is considered incorrect by the Romanian Academy.\nRomanian writings, including books created to teach children to write, treat the comma and cedilla as a variation in font.\nSee [Unicode and HTML](https://bliptext.com/articles/) below.\n# [Pre-(top) and post-1993 (bottom) street signs in Bucharest, showing the two different spellings of the same name | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Two///Romanian///spellings///1.jpg]\n\n## Î versus Â\nThe letters î and â are phonetically and [functionally](https://bliptext.com/articles/phonology) identical.\nThe reason for using both of them is historical, denoting the language's [Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-language) origin.\nFor a few decades until a [spelling reform](https://bliptext.com/articles/spelling-reform) in 1904, as many as four or five letters had been used for the same phoneme (â, ê, î, û, and occasionally ô, see[ Removed Letters](https://bliptext.com/articles/)), according to an etymological rule.\nAll were used to represent the vowel, toward which the original Latin vowels written with circumflexes had converged.\nThe 1904 reform saw only two letters remaining, â and î, the choice of which followed rules that changed several times during the 20th century.\nDuring the first half of the century the rule was to use î in word-initial and word-final positions, and â everywhere else.\nThere were exceptions, imposing the use of î in internal positions when words were combined or derived with prefixes or suffixes.\nFor example, the adjective urît \"ugly\" was written with î because it derives from the verb a urî \"to hate\".\nIn 1953, during the [Communist era](https://bliptext.com/articles/communist-romania), the [Romanian Academy](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-academy) eliminated the letter â, replacing it with î everywhere, including the name of the country, which was to be spelled Romînia.\nThe first stipulation coincided with the official designation of the country as a [People's Republic](https://bliptext.com/articles/people-s-republic), which meant that its full title was Republica Populară Romînă.\nA minor spelling reform in 1964 brought back the letter â, but only in the spelling of român \"Romanian\" and all its derivatives, including the name of the country.\nAs such, the [Socialist Republic](https://bliptext.com/articles/communist-state) proclaimed in 1965 is associated with the spelling Republica Socialistă România.\nSoon after the fall of the [Ceaușescu](https://bliptext.com/articles/nicolae-ceau-escu) government, the [Romanian Academy](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-academy) decided to reintroduce â from 1993 onward, by canceling the effects of the 1953 spelling reform and essentially reverting to the 1904 rules (with some differences).\nThe move was publicly justified as the rectification either of a Communist assault on tradition, or of a Soviet influence on the Romanian culture, and as a return to a traditional spelling that bears the mark of the language's Latin origin.\nThe political context at the time, however, was that the Romanian Academy was largely regarded as a Communist and corrupt institution — [Nicolae Ceaușescu](https://bliptext.com/articles/nicolae-ceau-escu) and his wife [Elena](https://bliptext.com/articles/elena-ceau-escu) had been its honored members, and membership had been controlled by the Communist Party.\nAs such, the 1993 spelling reform was seen as an attempt of the Academy to break with its Communist past.\nThe Academy invited the national community of linguists as well as foreign linguists specialized in Romanian to discuss the problem; when these overwhelmingly opposed the spelling reform in vehement terms, their position was explicitly dismissed as being too scientific.\nAccording to the 1993 reform, the choice between î and â is thus again based on a rule that is neither strictly etymological nor phonological, but positional and morphological.\nThe sound is always spelled as â, except at the beginning and the end of words, where î is to be used instead.\nExceptions include [proper nouns](https://bliptext.com/articles/proper-noun) where the usage of the letters is frozen, whichever it may be, and compound words, whose components are each separately subjected to the rule (e.g. ne- + îndemânatic → neîndemânatic \"clumsy\", not *neândemânatic).\nHowever, the exception no longer applies to words derived with suffixes, in contrast with the 1904 norm; for instance what was spelled urît after 1904 became urât after 1993.\nAlthough the reform was promoted as a means to show the Latin origin of Romanian, statistically only few of the words written with â according to the 1993 reform actually derive from Latin words having an a in the corresponding position.\nIn fact, this includes a large number of words that contained an i in the original Latin and are similarly written with i in their Italian or Spanish counterparts.\nExamples include rîu \"river\", from the Latin rivus (compare [Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/spanish-language) río), now written râu; along with rîde < ridere, sîn < sinus, strînge < stringere, lumînare < luminaria, etc.\nWhile the 1993 spelling norm is compulsory in [Romanian education](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-educational-system) and official publications, and gradually most other publications came to use it, there are still individuals, publications and publishing houses preferring the previous spelling norm or a mixed hybrid system of their own; among them are the weekly cultural magazine Dilema Veche and the daily Gazeta Sporturilor.\nSome publications allow authors to choose either spelling norm; these include România literară, the magazine of the [Writers' Union of Romania](https://bliptext.com/articles/writers-union-of-romania), and publishing houses such as Polirom.\nDictionaries, grammars and other linguistic works have also been published using the î and sînt long after the 1993 reform.\nUltimately, the conflict results from two different linguistically-based reasonings as to how to spell.\nThe choice of â derives from a being the most average or central of the five vowels (the official [Bulgarian romanization](https://bliptext.com/articles/bulgarian-romanization) uses the same logic, choosing a for ъ, resulting in the country's name being spelled Balgariya; and also the European Portuguese vowel for a mentioned above), whereas î is an attempt to choose the Latin letter that most intuitively writes the sound (similarly to how [Polish](https://bliptext.com/articles/polish-language) uses the letter y).\n\n## Comma-below (ș and ț) versus cedilla (ş and ţ)\nAlthough the Romanian Academy standard mandates the comma-below variants for the sounds and, the cedilla variants are still widely used.\nMany printed and online texts still incorrectly use \"[ş|s with cedilla](https://bliptext.com/articles/s-with-cedilla)\" and \"[ţ|t with cedilla](https://bliptext.com/articles/t-with-cedilla)\".\nThis state of affairs is due to an initial lack of glyph standardization, compounded by the lack of computer font support for the comma-below variants (see the [Unicode](https://bliptext.com/articles/) section for details).\nThe lack of support for the comma diacritics has been corrected in current versions of major operating systems: Windows Vista or newer, Linux distributions after 2005 and currently supported macOS versions.\nAs mandated by the European Union, Microsoft released a [font update](https://bliptext.com/articles/undefined) to correct this deficiency in Windows XP (also applicable to 2000/Server 2003) in early 2007, soon after Romania joined the European Union.\n\n## Obsolete letters\nBefore the spelling reform of 1904, there were several additional letters with diacritical marks.\nIn addition, the acute accent ([á](https://bliptext.com/articles/), [í](https://bliptext.com/articles/)) was used in verb infinitives and 3rd-person imperfect forms stressed on the last syllable: lăud[á](https://bliptext.com/articles/) (\"to praise\"), aud̦[í](https://bliptext.com/articles/) (\"to hear\"), 3rd-person imperfect lăud[á](https://bliptext.com/articles/), aud̦i[á](https://bliptext.com/articles/).\nThe grave accent ([à](https://bliptext.com/articles/), [ì](https://bliptext.com/articles/), [ù](https://bliptext.com/articles/)) was used in 3rd-person perfect forms stressed on the last syllable: lăud[à](https://bliptext.com/articles/), aud̦[ì](https://bliptext.com/articles/).\nUse of these letters was not fully adopted even before 1904, as some publications (e.g. [Timpul](https://bliptext.com/articles/timpul) and [Universul](https://bliptext.com/articles/universul)) chose to use a simplified approach that resembled today's Romanian language writing.\n# [Old Bucharest manhole cover inscribed according to the etymologically prone spelling at the time, which reads BUCURESCI CANALISARE (meaning Bucharest, sewers). Compare to today's BUCUREȘTI CANALIZARE. | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Manhole///cover///near///the///intersetion///of///Bulevardul///Hristo///Botev///and///Bulevardul///Corneliu///Coposu///in///Bucharest.jpg]\n\n## Other diacritics\nAs with other languages, the [acute accent](https://bliptext.com/articles/acute-accent) is sometimes used in Romanian texts to indicate the [stressed vowel](https://bliptext.com/articles/stress-linguistics) in some words.\nThis use is regular in dictionary headwords, but also occasionally found in carefully edited texts to disambiguate between [homographs](https://bliptext.com/articles/homograph) that are not also [homophones](https://bliptext.com/articles/homophone), such as to differentiate between cópii (\"copies\") and copíi (\"children\"), éra (\"the era\") and erá (\"was\"), ácele (\"the needles\") and acéle (\"those\"), etc. The accent also distinguishes between homographic verb forms, such as încúie and încuié (\"he locks\" and \"he has locked\").\nDiacritics in some borrowings are kept: bourrée, pietà.\nForeign names are also usually spelled with their original diacritics: Bâle, Molière, even when an acute accent might be wrongly interpreted as a stress, as in István or Gérard.\nHowever, frequently used foreign names, such as names of cities or countries, are often spelled without diacritics: Bogota, Panama, Peru.\n\n# Digital typography\n\n## ISO 8859\nThe character encoding standard [ISO 8859](https://bliptext.com/articles/iso-8859) initially defined a single code page for the entire Central and Eastern Europe — [ISO 8859](https://bliptext.com/articles/iso-8859)-2.\nThis code page includes only \"s\" and \"t\" with cedillas.\nThe South-Eastern European [ISO 8859-16](https://bliptext.com/articles/iso-8859-16) includes \"s\" and \"t\" with comma below on the same places \"s\" and \"t\" with cedilla were in ISO 8859-2.\nThe ISO 8859-16 code page became a standard after Unicode became widespread, however, so it was largely ignored by software vendors.\n# [Widespread incorrect usage of Romanian diacritics with examples | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Widespread///wrong///usage///of///Romanian///diacritics.svg]\n\n## Unicode and HTML\nThe circumflex and breve accented Romanian letters were part of the [Unicode](https://bliptext.com/articles/unicode) standard since its inception, as well as the cedilla variants of s and t. Ș and ț (comma-below variants) were added to [Unicode](https://bliptext.com/articles/unicode) version 3.0.\nFrom Unicode version 3.0 to version 5.1, the cedilla-using characters were specified by the Unicode Standard to be \"used in both Turkish and Romanian data\" and that \"a glyph variant with comma below is preferred for Romanian\"; On the newly encoded comma-using characters, it said that they should be used \"when distinct comma below form is required\".\nUnicode 5.2 explicitly states that \"the form with the cedilla is preferred in Turkish, and the form with the comma below is preferred in Romanian\", while mentioning (possibly for historical reasons) that \"in Turkish and Romanian, a cedilla and a comma below sometimes replace one another\".\nWidespread adoption was hampered for some years by the lack of fonts providing the new glyphs.\nIn May 2007, four months after Romania (and Bulgaria) joined the [EU](https://bliptext.com/articles/european-union), Microsoft released updated fonts that include all official glyphs of the Romanian (and [Bulgarian](https://bliptext.com/articles/bulgarian-language)) alphabet.\nThis font update targeted Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003.\nThe subset of Unicode most widely supported on Microsoft Windows systems, [Windows Glyph List 4](https://bliptext.com/articles/windows-glyph-list-4), still does not include the comma-below variants of S and T.\nVowels with diacritics are coded as follows:\n\n### Adobe/Linotype de facto standard\n[Adobe Systems](https://bliptext.com/articles/adobe-systems) decided that the Unicode glyphs \"t with cedilla\" U+0162/3 are not used in any language.\n(It is in fact used, but in very few languages. T with Cedilla exists as part of the [General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/general-alphabet-of-cameroon-languages), in some Gagauz orthographies, in the [Kabyle dialect](https://bliptext.com/articles/kabyle-dialect) of the [Berber language](https://bliptext.com/articles/berber-language), and possibly elsewhere.) Adobe has therefore substituted the glyphs with \"t with comma below\" (U+021A/B) in all the fonts they ship.\nThe unfortunate consequence of this decision is that Romanian documents using the (unofficial) Unicode points U+015E/F and U+0162/3 (for ş and ţ) are rendered in Adobe fonts in a visually inconsistent way using \"s with cedilla\", but \"t with comma\" (see figure).\n[Linotype](https://bliptext.com/articles/mergenthaler-linotype-company) fonts that support Romanian glyphs mostly follow this convention.\nThe fonts used by Microsoft before Windows Vista also implement this de facto Adobe standard.\nFew Microsoft fonts provide a consistent look when cedilla variants are used; notable ones are [Tahoma](https://bliptext.com/articles/tahoma-typeface), [Verdana](https://bliptext.com/articles/verdana), [Trebuchet MS](https://bliptext.com/articles/trebuchet-ms), [Microsoft Sans Serif](https://bliptext.com/articles/microsoft-sans-serif) and [Segoe UI](https://bliptext.com/articles/segoe-ui).\nThe free [DejaVu](https://bliptext.com/articles/dejavu-fonts) and [Linux Libertine](https://bliptext.com/articles/linux-libertine) fonts provide proper and consistent glyphs in both variants.\n[Red Hat](https://bliptext.com/articles/red-hat)'s [Liberation fonts](https://bliptext.com/articles/liberation-fonts) only support the comma below variants starting with version 1.04, scheduled for inclusion in [Fedora](https://bliptext.com/articles/fedora-operating-system) 10.\n# [Inconsistent cedilla glyphs in Adobe Caslon (left). The correct Romanian rendering (right) can be obtained by activating the OpenType feature, which remaps the s with cedilla glyph to comma-below. The rendering on the right is visually indistinguishable from the rendering produced by comma-below code points for this font. | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/The///%C5%9Fu%C5%A3///%C8%99u%C8%9B///font///demo///in///Adobe///Caslon///Pro///Regular///via///Fontmatrix.png]\n\n### OpenType feature\nSome [OpenType](https://bliptext.com/articles/opentype) fonts from Adobe and all C-series [Vista fonts](https://bliptext.com/articles/category-windows-vista-typefaces) implement the optional [OpenType](https://bliptext.com/articles/opentype) feature.\nThis feature forces \"s with cedilla\" to be rendered using the same glyph as \"s with comma below\".\nWhen this second (but optional) remapping takes place, Romanian Unicode text is rendered with comma-below glyphs regardless of code point variants.\nUnfortunately, most Microsoft pre-Vista OpenType fonts ([Arial](https://bliptext.com/articles/arial) etc.) do not implement the feature, even after the European Union Expansion Font Update, so old documents will look inconsistent as in the left side of the above figure.\nSelect few fonts, e.g. [Verdana](https://bliptext.com/articles/verdana) and [Trebuchet MS](https://bliptext.com/articles/trebuchet-ms), not only have a consistent look for cedilla variants (after the EU update), but also do a simultaneous remapping of cedilla s and t to comma-below variants when is activated.\nThe free DejaVu and Linux Libertine fonts do not yet offer this feature in their current releases, but development versions do.\n[Pango](https://bliptext.com/articles/pango) supports the tag since version 1.17.\n[XeTeX](https://bliptext.com/articles/xetex) supports since version 0.995.\nAs of July 2008, very few Windows applications support the feature tag.\nFrom the Adobe [CS3](https://bliptext.com/articles/adobe-cs3) suite, only [InDesign](https://bliptext.com/articles/adobe-indesign) has support for it.\nThe status of Romanian support in the free fonts that ship with [Fedora](https://bliptext.com/articles/fedora-operating-system) is maintained at [Fedoraproject.org](https://bliptext.com/articles/undefined).\n\n### Combining characters\nUnicode also allows diacritical marks to be represented as separate [combining diacritical marks](https://bliptext.com/articles/unicode).\nThe relevant combining accents are U+0326 COMBINING COMMA BELOW and U+0327 COMBINING CEDILLA.\nSupport for applying a combining Comma Below to letters S and T may have been poorly supported in commercial fonts in the past, but nearly all modern fonts can successfully handle both the Cedilla and Comma Below marks for S and T. As with all fonts, typographical quality can vary, and so it is preferable to use the single code points instead.\nWhenever a combining diacritical mark is used in a document, the font in use should be tested to confirm that it is rendered acceptably.\n\n## (La)TeX\n[LaTeX](https://bliptext.com/articles/latex) allows typesetting in Romanian using the cedilla Ş and Ţ using the [Cork encoding](https://bliptext.com/articles/cork-encoding).\nThe comma-below variants are not completely supported in the standard 8-bit TeX font encodings.\nThe lack of a standard [LICR](https://bliptext.com/articles/latex-internal-character-representation) (LaTeX Internal Character Representations) for comma-below Ș and Ț is part of the problem.\nThe input method attempts to remedy the problem by defining the \\textcommabelow LICR accent.\nThis is unfortunately not supported by the input method.\nThe problem may partially worked around in a LaTeX document using these settings, which would allow use of ș, ț or their cedilla variants directly in the LaTeX source:\n\\usepackage[latin10,utf8]{inputenc}\n% transliterates utf8 chars with çedila at their comma-below representation\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{015F}{\\textcommabelow s} % ş\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{015E}{\\textcommabelow S} % Ş\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0163}{\\textcommabelow t} % ţ\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0162}{\\textcommabelow T} % Ţ\n% transliterates utf8 comma-below characters to the comma-below representation\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0219}{\\textcommabelow s} % ș\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0218}{\\textcommabelow S} % Ș\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{021B}{\\textcommabelow t} % ț\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{021A}{\\textcommabelow T} % Ț\nThe package composes the comma-below glyphs by superimposing a comma and the letters S and T. This method is suitable only for printing.\nIn [PDF](https://bliptext.com/articles/pdf) documents produced this way searching or copying text does not work properly.\nThe Polish QX encoding has some support for comma-below glyphs, which are improperly mapped to cedilla LICRs, but also lacks A breve (Ă), which must always be composite, thus unsearchable.\nIn the [Latin Modern](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-modern) [Type 1 fonts](https://bliptext.com/articles/postscript-fonts) the T with comma below is found under the AGL name /Tcommaaccent.\nThis is in contradiction with Adobe's decision discussed above, which puts a T with comma-below at /Tcedilla.\nIn consequence, no fixed mapping can work across all Type 1 fonts; each font must come with its own mapping.\nUnfortunately, TeX output drivers, like [dvips](https://bliptext.com/articles/dvips), [dvipdfm](https://bliptext.com/articles/dvipdfm) or [pdfTeX](https://bliptext.com/articles/pdftex)'s internal PDF driver, access the glyphs by [AGL](https://bliptext.com/articles/adobe-glyph-list) name.\nSince all of the output drivers mentioned are unaware of this peculiarity, the problem is essentially intractable across all fonts.\nIn consequence, one needs to use fonts that include a mapping which is not bypassed by TeX. This is the case with newer TeX engine [XeTeX](https://bliptext.com/articles/xetex), which can use Unicode OpenType fonts, and does not bypass the font's Unicode map.\n\n## Keyboard layout\nModern computer operating systems can be configured to implement a standard Romanian keyboard layout, to permit typing on any keyboard as if it were a Romanian keyboard.\nIn systems such as Linux which employ the XCompose system, Romanian letters may be typed from a non-Romanian keyboard layout using a [compose-key](https://bliptext.com/articles/compose-key).\nThe system's keyboard layout must be set up to use a compose-key.\n(Exactly how this is accomplished depends on the distribution.) For instance, the 'left Alt' key is often used as a compose-key.\nTo type a letter with a diacritical mark, the compose-key is held down while another key is typed indicate the mark to be applied, then the base letter is typed.\nFor instance, when using an English (US) keyboard layout, to produce ț, hold the compose-key down while typing semicolon ';', then release the compose-key and type 't'.\nOther marks may be similarly applied as follows:\n\n# Spelling alphabet\nThere is a Romanian equivalent to the English-language [spelling alphabets](https://bliptext.com/articles/spelling-alphabet).\nMost of the code words are people's first names, with the exception of K, J, Q, W and Y. Letters with diacritics (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, Ț) are generally transmitted without diacritics (A, A, I, S, T).","current_revision":null,"created_by":"kACnuQmH5k9Nr5VNVEpVeg7XpvUmMctD","created_at":"2025-01-25T19:32:40.594Z","updated_at":"2025-01-25T19:32:40.594Z","search_vector":"'alphabet':2 'romanian':1","search_content":" \n**Name:** Romanian alphabet \n**Type:** [Alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/alphabet) \n**Languages:** [Romanian](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-language) \n**Time:** 1860s – present \n**Fam 1:** [Egyptian hieroglyphs](https://bliptext.com/articles/egyptian-hieroglyphs) \n**Fam 2:** [Proto-Sinaitic](https://bliptext.com/articles/proto-sinaitic) \n**Fam 3:** [Phoenician alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/phoenician-alphabet) \n**Fam 4:** [Greek alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/greek-alphabet) \n**Fam 5:** [Latin alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-script) \n**Fam 6:** [Italian alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/italian-alphabet) \n**Unicode:** subset of [Latin (U+0000...U+024F)](https://bliptext.com/articles/unicode-latin) \n**Sample:** Romanian alphabet.svg \n**Imagesize:** 300px \n \n\n# \nThe **Romanian alphabet** is a variant of the [Latin alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-alphabet) used for writing the [Romanian language](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-language).\nIt is a modification of the [classical Latin alphabet](https://bliptext.com/articles/classical-latin-alphabet) and consists of 31 letters, five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language.\nThe letters Q (chiu), W (dublu ve), and Y (igrec or i grec, meaning \"Greek i\") were formally introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier.\nThey occur only in foreign words and their Romanian derivatives, such as [quasar](https://bliptext.com/articles/quasar), [watt](https://bliptext.com/articles/watt), and [yacht](https://bliptext.com/articles/yacht).\nThe letter K, although relatively older, is also rarely used and appears only in proper names and international neologisms such as kilogram, broker, karate.\nThese four letters are still perceived as foreign, which explains their usage for stylistic purposes in words such as nomenklatură (normally nomenclatură, meaning \"nomenclature\", but sometimes spelled with k instead of c if referring to members of the Communist leadership in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, as [nomenklatura](https://bliptext.com/articles/nomenklatura) is used in English).\nMost of the and in learned Latin words (or Greek words via Latin) are replaced by and respectively (e.g. acvariu \"aquarium\", oxigen \"oxygen\").\nHowever, the is retained in ytriu (\"yttrium\") and yterbiu (\"ytterbium\"), probably because of the element symbols Y and Yb.\nIn cases where the word is a direct borrowing having diacritical marks not present in the above alphabet, official spelling tends to favor their use ([München](https://bliptext.com/articles/m-nchen), [Angoulême](https://bliptext.com/articles/angoul-me) etc., as opposed to the use of [Istanbul](https://bliptext.com/articles/istanbul) over İstanbul).\n\n# Letters and their pronunciation\nRomanian spelling is mostly phonemic without silent letters (but see i).\nThe table below gives the correspondence between letters and sounds.\nSome of the letters have several possible readings, even if [allophones](https://bliptext.com/articles/allophone) are not taken into account.\nWhen vowels, , , and are changed into their corresponding [semivowels](https://bliptext.com/articles/semivowel), this is not marked in writing.\nLetters K, Q, W, and Y appear only in foreign borrowings; the pronunciation of W and Y and of the combination QU depends on the origin of the word they appear in.\n\n# Special letters\nRomanian [orthography](https://bliptext.com/articles/orthography) does not use accents or [diacritics](https://bliptext.com/articles/diacritic) – these are secondary symbols added to letters (i.e. basic [glyphs](https://bliptext.com/articles/glyph)) to alter their pronunciation or to distinguish between words.\nThere are, however, five special letters in the Romanian alphabet (associated with four different sounds) which are formed by modifying other Latin letters; strictly speaking these letters function as basic glyphs in their own right rather than letters with diacritical marks, but they are often referred to as the latter.\nThe letter â is used exclusively in the middle of words; its [majuscule](https://bliptext.com/articles/majuscule) version appears only in all-capitals inscriptions.\nWriting letters ș and ț with a cedilla instead of a comma is considered incorrect by the Romanian Academy.\nRomanian writings, including books created to teach children to write, treat the comma and cedilla as a variation in font.\nSee [Unicode and HTML](https://bliptext.com/articles/) below.\n# [Pre-(top) and post-1993 (bottom) street signs in Bucharest, showing the two different spellings of the same name | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Two///Romanian///spellings///1.jpg]\n\n## Î versus Â\nThe letters î and â are phonetically and [functionally](https://bliptext.com/articles/phonology) identical.\nThe reason for using both of them is historical, denoting the language's [Latin](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-language) origin.\nFor a few decades until a [spelling reform](https://bliptext.com/articles/spelling-reform) in 1904, as many as four or five letters had been used for the same phoneme (â, ê, î, û, and occasionally ô, see[ Removed Letters](https://bliptext.com/articles/)), according to an etymological rule.\nAll were used to represent the vowel, toward which the original Latin vowels written with circumflexes had converged.\nThe 1904 reform saw only two letters remaining, â and î, the choice of which followed rules that changed several times during the 20th century.\nDuring the first half of the century the rule was to use î in word-initial and word-final positions, and â everywhere else.\nThere were exceptions, imposing the use of î in internal positions when words were combined or derived with prefixes or suffixes.\nFor example, the adjective urît \"ugly\" was written with î because it derives from the verb a urî \"to hate\".\nIn 1953, during the [Communist era](https://bliptext.com/articles/communist-romania), the [Romanian Academy](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-academy) eliminated the letter â, replacing it with î everywhere, including the name of the country, which was to be spelled Romînia.\nThe first stipulation coincided with the official designation of the country as a [People's Republic](https://bliptext.com/articles/people-s-republic), which meant that its full title was Republica Populară Romînă.\nA minor spelling reform in 1964 brought back the letter â, but only in the spelling of român \"Romanian\" and all its derivatives, including the name of the country.\nAs such, the [Socialist Republic](https://bliptext.com/articles/communist-state) proclaimed in 1965 is associated with the spelling Republica Socialistă România.\nSoon after the fall of the [Ceaușescu](https://bliptext.com/articles/nicolae-ceau-escu) government, the [Romanian Academy](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-academy) decided to reintroduce â from 1993 onward, by canceling the effects of the 1953 spelling reform and essentially reverting to the 1904 rules (with some differences).\nThe move was publicly justified as the rectification either of a Communist assault on tradition, or of a Soviet influence on the Romanian culture, and as a return to a traditional spelling that bears the mark of the language's Latin origin.\nThe political context at the time, however, was that the Romanian Academy was largely regarded as a Communist and corrupt institution — [Nicolae Ceaușescu](https://bliptext.com/articles/nicolae-ceau-escu) and his wife [Elena](https://bliptext.com/articles/elena-ceau-escu) had been its honored members, and membership had been controlled by the Communist Party.\nAs such, the 1993 spelling reform was seen as an attempt of the Academy to break with its Communist past.\nThe Academy invited the national community of linguists as well as foreign linguists specialized in Romanian to discuss the problem; when these overwhelmingly opposed the spelling reform in vehement terms, their position was explicitly dismissed as being too scientific.\nAccording to the 1993 reform, the choice between î and â is thus again based on a rule that is neither strictly etymological nor phonological, but positional and morphological.\nThe sound is always spelled as â, except at the beginning and the end of words, where î is to be used instead.\nExceptions include [proper nouns](https://bliptext.com/articles/proper-noun) where the usage of the letters is frozen, whichever it may be, and compound words, whose components are each separately subjected to the rule (e.g. ne- + îndemânatic → neîndemânatic \"clumsy\", not *neândemânatic).\nHowever, the exception no longer applies to words derived with suffixes, in contrast with the 1904 norm; for instance what was spelled urît after 1904 became urât after 1993.\nAlthough the reform was promoted as a means to show the Latin origin of Romanian, statistically only few of the words written with â according to the 1993 reform actually derive from Latin words having an a in the corresponding position.\nIn fact, this includes a large number of words that contained an i in the original Latin and are similarly written with i in their Italian or Spanish counterparts.\nExamples include rîu \"river\", from the Latin rivus (compare [Spanish](https://bliptext.com/articles/spanish-language) río), now written râu; along with rîde < ridere, sîn < sinus, strînge < stringere, lumînare < luminaria, etc.\nWhile the 1993 spelling norm is compulsory in [Romanian education](https://bliptext.com/articles/romanian-educational-system) and official publications, and gradually most other publications came to use it, there are still individuals, publications and publishing houses preferring the previous spelling norm or a mixed hybrid system of their own; among them are the weekly cultural magazine Dilema Veche and the daily Gazeta Sporturilor.\nSome publications allow authors to choose either spelling norm; these include România literară, the magazine of the [Writers' Union of Romania](https://bliptext.com/articles/writers-union-of-romania), and publishing houses such as Polirom.\nDictionaries, grammars and other linguistic works have also been published using the î and sînt long after the 1993 reform.\nUltimately, the conflict results from two different linguistically-based reasonings as to how to spell.\nThe choice of â derives from a being the most average or central of the five vowels (the official [Bulgarian romanization](https://bliptext.com/articles/bulgarian-romanization) uses the same logic, choosing a for ъ, resulting in the country's name being spelled Balgariya; and also the European Portuguese vowel for a mentioned above), whereas î is an attempt to choose the Latin letter that most intuitively writes the sound (similarly to how [Polish](https://bliptext.com/articles/polish-language) uses the letter y).\n\n## Comma-below (ș and ț) versus cedilla (ş and ţ)\nAlthough the Romanian Academy standard mandates the comma-below variants for the sounds and, the cedilla variants are still widely used.\nMany printed and online texts still incorrectly use \"[ş|s with cedilla](https://bliptext.com/articles/s-with-cedilla)\" and \"[ţ|t with cedilla](https://bliptext.com/articles/t-with-cedilla)\".\nThis state of affairs is due to an initial lack of glyph standardization, compounded by the lack of computer font support for the comma-below variants (see the [Unicode](https://bliptext.com/articles/) section for details).\nThe lack of support for the comma diacritics has been corrected in current versions of major operating systems: Windows Vista or newer, Linux distributions after 2005 and currently supported macOS versions.\nAs mandated by the European Union, Microsoft released a [font update](https://bliptext.com/articles/undefined) to correct this deficiency in Windows XP (also applicable to 2000/Server 2003) in early 2007, soon after Romania joined the European Union.\n\n## Obsolete letters\nBefore the spelling reform of 1904, there were several additional letters with diacritical marks.\nIn addition, the acute accent ([á](https://bliptext.com/articles/), [í](https://bliptext.com/articles/)) was used in verb infinitives and 3rd-person imperfect forms stressed on the last syllable: lăud[á](https://bliptext.com/articles/) (\"to praise\"), aud̦[í](https://bliptext.com/articles/) (\"to hear\"), 3rd-person imperfect lăud[á](https://bliptext.com/articles/), aud̦i[á](https://bliptext.com/articles/).\nThe grave accent ([à](https://bliptext.com/articles/), [ì](https://bliptext.com/articles/), [ù](https://bliptext.com/articles/)) was used in 3rd-person perfect forms stressed on the last syllable: lăud[à](https://bliptext.com/articles/), aud̦[ì](https://bliptext.com/articles/).\nUse of these letters was not fully adopted even before 1904, as some publications (e.g. [Timpul](https://bliptext.com/articles/timpul) and [Universul](https://bliptext.com/articles/universul)) chose to use a simplified approach that resembled today's Romanian language writing.\n# [Old Bucharest manhole cover inscribed according to the etymologically prone spelling at the time, which reads BUCURESCI CANALISARE (meaning Bucharest, sewers). Compare to today's BUCUREȘTI CANALIZARE. | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Manhole///cover///near///the///intersetion///of///Bulevardul///Hristo///Botev///and///Bulevardul///Corneliu///Coposu///in///Bucharest.jpg]\n\n## Other diacritics\nAs with other languages, the [acute accent](https://bliptext.com/articles/acute-accent) is sometimes used in Romanian texts to indicate the [stressed vowel](https://bliptext.com/articles/stress-linguistics) in some words.\nThis use is regular in dictionary headwords, but also occasionally found in carefully edited texts to disambiguate between [homographs](https://bliptext.com/articles/homograph) that are not also [homophones](https://bliptext.com/articles/homophone), such as to differentiate between cópii (\"copies\") and copíi (\"children\"), éra (\"the era\") and erá (\"was\"), ácele (\"the needles\") and acéle (\"those\"), etc. The accent also distinguishes between homographic verb forms, such as încúie and încuié (\"he locks\" and \"he has locked\").\nDiacritics in some borrowings are kept: bourrée, pietà.\nForeign names are also usually spelled with their original diacritics: Bâle, Molière, even when an acute accent might be wrongly interpreted as a stress, as in István or Gérard.\nHowever, frequently used foreign names, such as names of cities or countries, are often spelled without diacritics: Bogota, Panama, Peru.\n\n# Digital typography\n\n## ISO 8859\nThe character encoding standard [ISO 8859](https://bliptext.com/articles/iso-8859) initially defined a single code page for the entire Central and Eastern Europe — [ISO 8859](https://bliptext.com/articles/iso-8859)-2.\nThis code page includes only \"s\" and \"t\" with cedillas.\nThe South-Eastern European [ISO 8859-16](https://bliptext.com/articles/iso-8859-16) includes \"s\" and \"t\" with comma below on the same places \"s\" and \"t\" with cedilla were in ISO 8859-2.\nThe ISO 8859-16 code page became a standard after Unicode became widespread, however, so it was largely ignored by software vendors.\n# [Widespread incorrect usage of Romanian diacritics with examples | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Widespread///wrong///usage///of///Romanian///diacritics.svg]\n\n## Unicode and HTML\nThe circumflex and breve accented Romanian letters were part of the [Unicode](https://bliptext.com/articles/unicode) standard since its inception, as well as the cedilla variants of s and t. Ș and ț (comma-below variants) were added to [Unicode](https://bliptext.com/articles/unicode) version 3.0.\nFrom Unicode version 3.0 to version 5.1, the cedilla-using characters were specified by the Unicode Standard to be \"used in both Turkish and Romanian data\" and that \"a glyph variant with comma below is preferred for Romanian\"; On the newly encoded comma-using characters, it said that they should be used \"when distinct comma below form is required\".\nUnicode 5.2 explicitly states that \"the form with the cedilla is preferred in Turkish, and the form with the comma below is preferred in Romanian\", while mentioning (possibly for historical reasons) that \"in Turkish and Romanian, a cedilla and a comma below sometimes replace one another\".\nWidespread adoption was hampered for some years by the lack of fonts providing the new glyphs.\nIn May 2007, four months after Romania (and Bulgaria) joined the [EU](https://bliptext.com/articles/european-union), Microsoft released updated fonts that include all official glyphs of the Romanian (and [Bulgarian](https://bliptext.com/articles/bulgarian-language)) alphabet.\nThis font update targeted Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003.\nThe subset of Unicode most widely supported on Microsoft Windows systems, [Windows Glyph List 4](https://bliptext.com/articles/windows-glyph-list-4), still does not include the comma-below variants of S and T.\nVowels with diacritics are coded as follows:\n\n### Adobe/Linotype de facto standard\n[Adobe Systems](https://bliptext.com/articles/adobe-systems) decided that the Unicode glyphs \"t with cedilla\" U+0162/3 are not used in any language.\n(It is in fact used, but in very few languages. T with Cedilla exists as part of the [General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages](https://bliptext.com/articles/general-alphabet-of-cameroon-languages), in some Gagauz orthographies, in the [Kabyle dialect](https://bliptext.com/articles/kabyle-dialect) of the [Berber language](https://bliptext.com/articles/berber-language), and possibly elsewhere.) Adobe has therefore substituted the glyphs with \"t with comma below\" (U+021A/B) in all the fonts they ship.\nThe unfortunate consequence of this decision is that Romanian documents using the (unofficial) Unicode points U+015E/F and U+0162/3 (for ş and ţ) are rendered in Adobe fonts in a visually inconsistent way using \"s with cedilla\", but \"t with comma\" (see figure).\n[Linotype](https://bliptext.com/articles/mergenthaler-linotype-company) fonts that support Romanian glyphs mostly follow this convention.\nThe fonts used by Microsoft before Windows Vista also implement this de facto Adobe standard.\nFew Microsoft fonts provide a consistent look when cedilla variants are used; notable ones are [Tahoma](https://bliptext.com/articles/tahoma-typeface), [Verdana](https://bliptext.com/articles/verdana), [Trebuchet MS](https://bliptext.com/articles/trebuchet-ms), [Microsoft Sans Serif](https://bliptext.com/articles/microsoft-sans-serif) and [Segoe UI](https://bliptext.com/articles/segoe-ui).\nThe free [DejaVu](https://bliptext.com/articles/dejavu-fonts) and [Linux Libertine](https://bliptext.com/articles/linux-libertine) fonts provide proper and consistent glyphs in both variants.\n[Red Hat](https://bliptext.com/articles/red-hat)'s [Liberation fonts](https://bliptext.com/articles/liberation-fonts) only support the comma below variants starting with version 1.04, scheduled for inclusion in [Fedora](https://bliptext.com/articles/fedora-operating-system) 10.\n# [Inconsistent cedilla glyphs in Adobe Caslon (left). The correct Romanian rendering (right) can be obtained by activating the OpenType feature, which remaps the s with cedilla glyph to comma-below. The rendering on the right is visually indistinguishable from the rendering produced by comma-below code points for this font. | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/The///%C5%9Fu%C5%A3///%C8%99u%C8%9B///font///demo///in///Adobe///Caslon///Pro///Regular///via///Fontmatrix.png]\n\n### OpenType feature\nSome [OpenType](https://bliptext.com/articles/opentype) fonts from Adobe and all C-series [Vista fonts](https://bliptext.com/articles/category-windows-vista-typefaces) implement the optional [OpenType](https://bliptext.com/articles/opentype) feature.\nThis feature forces \"s with cedilla\" to be rendered using the same glyph as \"s with comma below\".\nWhen this second (but optional) remapping takes place, Romanian Unicode text is rendered with comma-below glyphs regardless of code point variants.\nUnfortunately, most Microsoft pre-Vista OpenType fonts ([Arial](https://bliptext.com/articles/arial) etc.) do not implement the feature, even after the European Union Expansion Font Update, so old documents will look inconsistent as in the left side of the above figure.\nSelect few fonts, e.g. [Verdana](https://bliptext.com/articles/verdana) and [Trebuchet MS](https://bliptext.com/articles/trebuchet-ms), not only have a consistent look for cedilla variants (after the EU update), but also do a simultaneous remapping of cedilla s and t to comma-below variants when is activated.\nThe free DejaVu and Linux Libertine fonts do not yet offer this feature in their current releases, but development versions do.\n[Pango](https://bliptext.com/articles/pango) supports the tag since version 1.17.\n[XeTeX](https://bliptext.com/articles/xetex) supports since version 0.995.\nAs of July 2008, very few Windows applications support the feature tag.\nFrom the Adobe [CS3](https://bliptext.com/articles/adobe-cs3) suite, only [InDesign](https://bliptext.com/articles/adobe-indesign) has support for it.\nThe status of Romanian support in the free fonts that ship with [Fedora](https://bliptext.com/articles/fedora-operating-system) is maintained at [[Fedora](https://bliptext.com/articles/fedora-operating-system)project.org](https://bliptext.com/articles/undefined).\n\n### Combining characters\nUnicode also allows diacritical marks to be represented as separate [combining diacritical marks](https://bliptext.com/articles/unicode).\nThe relevant combining accents are U+0326 COMBINING COMMA BELOW and U+0327 COMBINING CEDILLA.\nSupport for applying a combining Comma Below to letters S and T may have been poorly supported in commercial fonts in the past, but nearly all modern fonts can successfully handle both the Cedilla and Comma Below marks for S and T. As with all fonts, typographical quality can vary, and so it is preferable to use the single code points instead.\nWhenever a combining diacritical mark is used in a document, the font in use should be tested to confirm that it is rendered acceptably.\n\n## (La)TeX\n[LaTeX](https://bliptext.com/articles/latex) allows typesetting in Romanian using the cedilla Ş and Ţ using the [Cork encoding](https://bliptext.com/articles/cork-encoding).\nThe comma-below variants are not completely supported in the standard 8-bit TeX font encodings.\nThe lack of a standard [LICR](https://bliptext.com/articles/latex-internal-character-representation) (LaTeX Internal Character Representations) for comma-below Ș and Ț is part of the problem.\nThe input method attempts to remedy the problem by defining the \\textcommabelow LICR accent.\nThis is unfortunately not supported by the input method.\nThe problem may partially worked around in a LaTeX document using these settings, which would allow use of ș, ț or their cedilla variants directly in the LaTeX source:\n\\usepackage[latin10,utf8]{inputenc}\n% transliterates utf8 chars with çedila at their comma-below representation\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{015F}{\\textcommabelow s} % ş\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{015E}{\\textcommabelow S} % Ş\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0163}{\\textcommabelow t} % ţ\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0162}{\\textcommabelow T} % Ţ\n% transliterates utf8 comma-below characters to the comma-below representation\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0219}{\\textcommabelow s} % ș\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0218}{\\textcommabelow S} % Ș\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{021B}{\\textcommabelow t} % ț\n\\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{021A}{\\textcommabelow T} % Ț\nThe package composes the comma-below glyphs by superimposing a comma and the letters S and T. This method is suitable only for printing.\nIn [PDF](https://bliptext.com/articles/pdf) documents produced this way searching or copying text does not work properly.\nThe Polish QX encoding has some support for comma-below glyphs, which are improperly mapped to cedilla LICRs, but also lacks A breve (Ă), which must always be composite, thus unsearchable.\nIn the [Latin Modern](https://bliptext.com/articles/latin-modern) [Type 1 fonts](https://bliptext.com/articles/postscript-fonts) the T with comma below is found under the AGL name /Tcommaaccent.\nThis is in contradiction with Adobe's decision discussed above, which puts a T with comma-below at /Tcedilla.\nIn consequence, no fixed mapping can work across all Type 1 fonts; each font must come with its own mapping.\nUnfortunately, TeX output drivers, like [dvips](https://bliptext.com/articles/dvips), [dvipdfm](https://bliptext.com/articles/dvipdfm) or [pdfTeX](https://bliptext.com/articles/pdftex)'s internal PDF driver, access the glyphs by [AGL](https://bliptext.com/articles/adobe-glyph-list) name.\nSince all of the output drivers mentioned are unaware of this peculiarity, the problem is essentially intractable across all fonts.\nIn consequence, one needs to use fonts that include a mapping which is not bypassed by TeX. This is the case with newer TeX engine [XeTeX](https://bliptext.com/articles/xetex), which can use Unicode OpenType fonts, and does not bypass the font's Unicode map.\n\n## Keyboard layout\nModern computer operating systems can be configured to implement a standard Romanian keyboard layout, to permit typing on any keyboard as if it were a Romanian keyboard.\nIn systems such as Linux which employ the XCompose system, Romanian letters may be typed from a non-Romanian keyboard layout using a [compose-key](https://bliptext.com/articles/compose-key).\nThe system's keyboard layout must be set up to use a compose-key.\n(Exactly how this is accomplished depends on the distribution.) For instance, the 'left Alt' key is often used as a compose-key.\nTo type a letter with a diacritical mark, the compose-key is held down while another key is typed indicate the mark to be applied, then the base letter is typed.\nFor instance, when using an English (US) keyboard layout, to produce ț, hold the compose-key down while typing semicolon ';', then release the compose-key and type 't'.\nOther marks may be similarly applied as follows:\n\n# Spelling alphabet\nThere is a Romanian equivalent to the English-language [spelling alphabets](https://bliptext.com/articles/spelling-alphabet).\nMost of the code words are people's first names, with the exception of K, J, Q, W and Y. Letters with diacritics (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, Ț) are generally transmitted without diacritics (A, A, I, S, T).","revisionCount":0},"hasMore":false,"nextCursor":null}

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