Native Name
Româna

Official Language: Romania, Republic of Moldavia
Home Speakers: Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine

Background
It belongs to the Indo-European family, Romance group and is spoken by over 20 million people (over 26 million including second language speakers). It is the only such language spoken in Eastern Europe, having descended from the Latin introduced by the Roman Emperor Trajan when he conquered the region in the 2nd century A.D. Romanian is more archaic than the other Romance languages and has been influenced by the non-Romance languages spoken in nearby countries, especially Hungarian, Albanian, and the various Slavic languages. The main varieties are “Aromanian” (or Macedo-Romanian) which is often classified as a separate language, and “Moldavian”, spoken in the Moldavian Republic where it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Romanian proper is also called Daco-Romanian.

Reprinted from www.unhchr.ch/udhr/