Romanian Alphabet - Special Letters

Special Letters

Romanian does not use accents. In the sense of diacritics as being signs added to letters to alter their pronunciation or to make distinction between words, the Romanian alphabet does not have diacritics. There are, however, five special letters in the Romanian alphabet (associated with four different sounds), formed by modifying other Latin letters; strictly speaking they are not diacritics, but are generally referred to as such.

• Ă ă — a with breve – for the sound /ə/
• Â â — a with circumflex – for the sound /ɨ/
• Î î — i with circumflex – for the sound /ɨ/
• Ș ș — s with comma – for the sound /ʃ/
• Ț ț — t with comma – for the sound /t͡s/

The letter â is used exclusively in the middle of words; its majuscule version appears only in all-capitals inscriptions.

Writing letters ș and ț with a cedilla instead of a comma is considered incorrect by the Romanian Academy. Romanian writings, including books created to teach children to write, treat the comma and cedilla as a variation in font. See Unicode and HTML below.