Romanian and Italian are both Romance languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin.

This shared history means they have a massive amount of overlapping vocabulary and similar grammar rules.

Italian is often considered the closest major Romance language to Romanian.

However, geographical isolation and different historical influences caused Romanian to develop unique features not found in Italian.

This guide compares the vocabulary and grammar of these two beautiful languages.

Shared history and vocabulary

Romanian and Italian share a lexical similarity of around 77 percent.

This means that a huge portion of their vocabulary comes from the exact same Latin roots.

If you speak Italian, you’ll immediately recognize many common Romanian words.

Here’s a quick table showing how similar basic vocabulary is between the two languages.

Despite these similarities, Romanian vocabulary was heavily influenced by neighboring Slavic, Turkish, and Hungarian languages.

You’ll find many words in Romanian that look completely alien to an Italian speaker.

For example, the Romanian word for “love” is dragoste, which comes from Slavic origins.

The Italian word for love is amore, which comes directly from Latin.

Regional variations also play a role in Romanian vocabulary.

Romanian spoken in the Republic of Moldova contains far more Russian loanwords than the standard Romanian spoken in Bucharest.

Nouns, genders, and plurals

Both languages assign grammatical gender to their nouns.

Italian has two grammatical genders for nouns: masculine and feminine.

Romanian retained the neuter gender from Latin, giving it three noun genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.

Neuter nouns in Romanian act like masculine nouns in their singular form and feminine nouns in their plural form.

When it comes to making words plural, both languages do something very similar.

Unlike Spanish or French, which add an “s” to the end of a word, Romanian and Italian change the final vowel to create a plural.

The Italian word for boy is ragazzo, and the plural is ragazzi.

The Romanian equivalent works the exact same way.

The definite article placement

One of the biggest grammar differences between the two languages is how they handle the definite article.

In English, the definite article is the word “the”.

Italian uses proclitic articles, meaning the word “the” is placed directly in front of the noun.

If you want to say “the dog” in Italian, you say il cane.

Romanian uses enclitic articles, meaning the word “the” is attached directly to the end of the noun.

The Romanian word for dog is câine.

To say “the dog” in Romanian, you attach the article to the end of the word.

This feature makes Romanian unique among the major Romance languages.

Grammar cases

Grammar cases dictate how a word changes depending on its function in a sentence.

Italian completely lost the Latin case system over the centuries.

Italian relies entirely on prepositions (like di, a, and da) to show relationships between words.

Romanian is the only Romance language that preserved the Latin case system.

Romanian nouns change their endings depending on whether they’re the subject, direct object, or showing possession.

Romanian has five grammatical cases: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, and Vocative.

This makes Romanian grammar slightly more challenging for beginners compared to Italian.

Verb conjugations and pronouns

Verb conjugations in Romanian and Italian are incredibly similar.

Both languages sort their verbs into distinct conjugation groups based on their infinitive endings.

They also both inherited the “pro-drop” feature from Latin.

This means you can completely drop the subject pronoun (I, you, he, she) from a sentence because the verb ending already tells you who’s doing the action.

To say “I sing” in Italian, you just say canto instead of io canto.

You do the exact same thing in Romanian.

Here’s a comparison of the present tense conjugation for the verb “to sing”.

As you can see, the patterns and endings are practically identical.

Best way to learn Romanian today

If you want to master Romanian quickly, you need a resource that focuses on real-world communication.

I highly recommend Talk In Romanian as your absolute best starting point.

It’s our dedicated platform designed specifically to get you speaking and understanding natural Romanian right from day one.

You get access to high-quality audio, native speaker dialogues, and cultural insights you won’t find anywhere else.

If you’re looking for supplementary vocabulary drills, apps like Duolingo can be helpful for absolute beginners.

You can also use Memrise for basic flashcard repetition.

However, nothing will build your conversational fluency faster than a dedicated, comprehensive program.

Start your language journey with Talk In Romanian and experience the most effective way to learn.