Romanian Grammar

Romanian grammar is the body of rules that describe the structure of expressions in the Romanian language. Standard Romanian (i.e. the Daco-Romanian language within Eastern Romance) shares largely the same grammar and most of the vocabulary and phonological processes with the other three surviving varieties of Eastern Romance, viz. Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian.

As a Romance language, Romanian shares many characteristics with its more distant relatives: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese etc. However, Romanian has preserved certain features of Latin grammar that have been lost elsewhere. That could be explained by a host of arguments such as: relative isolation in the Balkans, possible pre-existence of identical grammatical structures in the Dacian, or other substratum (as opposed to the Germanic and Celtic substrata that the other Romance languages developed in contact with), and existence of similar elements in the neighboring languages. One Latin element that has survived in Romanian while having disappeared from other Romance languages is the morphological case differentiation in nouns, albeit reduced to only three forms (nominative/accusative, genitive/dative, and vocative) from the original six or seven. Another might be the retention of the neuter gender in nouns, although in synchronic terms, Romanian neuter nouns can also be analysed as "ambigeneric", i.e. as being masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural (see below) and even in diachronic terms certain linguists have argued that this pattern was in a sense "re-invented" rather than a "direct" continuation of the Latin neuter.

Romanian is attested from the 16th century. The first Romanian grammar was Elementa linguae daco-romanae sive valachicae by Samuil Micu and Gheorghe Șincai, published in 1780. Many modern writings on Romanian grammar, in particular most of those published by the Romanian Academy (Academia Română), are prescriptive; the rules regarding plural formation, verb conjugation, word spelling and meanings, etc. are revised periodically to include new tendencies in the language.