Romanian

Romanian
Language code (ISO 639-1)	ro
Language code (ISO 639-2) 3-char	rum, ron
Native speakers (L1)	24000000
2nd language speakers (L2)	4000000
Wikipedia page to check	wikipedia:Romanian language

Romanian (obsolete spellings: Rumanian or Roumanian; autonym: limba română [ˈlimba roˈmɨnə], or românește, lit. 'in Romanian') is the official and main language of Romania and Moldova.

As a minority language it is spoken by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania (Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia, and Ukraine), and by the large Romanian diaspora.

In total, it is spoken by 28–29 million people as a first or second language, of whom circa 24 million are native speakers. In Europe, Romanian occupies the 10th position among 37 official languages.

Romanian is part of the Eastern Romance sub-branch of Romance languages, a linguistic group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin which separated from the Western Romance languages in the course of the period from the 5th to the 8th centuries.

To distinguish it within the Eastern Romance languages, in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian.

Romanian was also known as Moldovan in Moldova, although the Constitutional Court of Moldova ruled in 2013 that "the official language of Moldova is Romanian".

On 16 March 2023, the Moldovan Parliament approved a law on referring to the national language as Romanian in all legislative texts and the constitution. On 22 March, the president of Moldova, Maia Sandu, promulgated the law.