We get this one a lot. Usually from people who mean well, often right after they find out we’re from Romania. “Oh, so you speak Russian then?” And every time, there’s a small pause where we have to decide how much history to get into.
The short answer is no. The longer answer is that Romanian is a Romance language, in the same family as Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. If you speak any of those, you’d actually recognise a surprising number of Romanian words. “Bună” (hello) doesn’t look like much on paper, but plenty of basic vocabulary, numbers, days of the week, family words, comes from Latin, the same as the rest of southern Europe.
The confusion makes sense, though. Romania sits in a part of Europe that gets lumped together a lot, especially from further west. Geographically we’re closer to Ukraine and Moldova than to Italy, and for a chunk of the twentieth century Romania was part of the Eastern Bloc, which is probably where the Russian assumption really comes from. But being politically aligned with a country for a few decades doesn’t rewrite centuries of language history. Russian is a Slavic language, completely different family, different alphabet even.
Funny enough, we actually understand a fair bit of Russian too, just from being neighbours and growing up with it around in some form or another. Their “da” (yes) sounds almost the same as ours, just said a bit more firmly. “Niet” we obviously all know. It’s more that understanding some of a language and actually speaking it natively are two very different things, and Romanian was never the second one for us.
There’s also a generational layer to this. Under communism, Russian was a mandatory subject in schools, so anyone who went to school before 1989 had at least some Russian classes, whether they wanted them or not. Younger generations didn’t, and mostly grew up with English or French instead. So depending on who you ask, you might get anything from “I had to study it for years and forgot most of it” to “never really touched it”.
What’s actually true is a bit messier and more interesting. Romanian has picked up words from Slavic languages over the centuries, from Hungarian, from Turkish, from German, a result of just being in a place where a lot of empires and neighbours overlapped. So it’s not a pure untouched Latin language either. But the bones of it, the grammar, the core vocabulary, the way sentences are built, that’s all Romance.
If you want a quick way to picture it: imagine Italian, if it had spent a few centuries hanging out in the Balkans, picking up some local habits along the way, but never actually forgetting where it came from.
So no, we don’t speak Russian. We’re not offended when people ask, it’s a fair guess given where we are on the map. But if you ever want to surprise a Romanian, try greeting them in Italian. There’s a decent chance they’ll understand more than you’d expect.
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