National Competence Centre Romania

The Languages of Romania

Next to the official language Romanian, the government declared 18 official minority languages. For every minority language, an official language policy was published to ensure the right of the minorities to speak their native language. Romanian is also the official language of Moldavia (where the language is called Moldavian), the autonomous province Volvodina in Serbia and the autonomous Mount Athos in Greek.
The four Romanian dialects (Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian) are listed in the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages because of their small amount of speaker.
Romanian belongs to the East Branch of the Romance language family. Because of the geographic isolation from other romance languages, it developed in another direction. It maintained many Latin elements like the morpho-syntactic structure or the vocativ.
Features of Romanian:

• 60% of the basic vocabulary descend from Latin.
• Word formation of new words are realised with derivation most of the time.
• The rich inflectional system contains for nouns, pronouns and adjectives five cases, two numbers and for pronouns stress or for nouns and adjectives definite or indefinite. Inflected forms alternate sometimes within the root.
• Romanian is a pro-drop language, i. e. subjects can be deleted, if the verb already contains the same information. There is also the possibility to double the subject or some pronominal clitics.

• Sections
• NCC Lead Romania
• Events
• Current National Initiatives
• META-NET White Paper on Polish
• Availability of Tools and Resources for Polish

NCC Lead Romania

Prof. Dan Tufiș leads as director and senior researcher the research institute for artificial intelligence at the Romanian Academy. Since 1982, his research comprises Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Language Technologies, Machine Learning, Natural Language Understanding and Generation, Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web. He authored and co-authored four books, edited 25 volumes and authored and co-authored over 350 book chapters, journal and conference articles in this wide area of scientific topics. He served as a member of the editorial board for 10 scientific journals.
Moreover, he participates in many international and national projects or initiatives of the LT or AI community. For example, he took part at the META-NET and CLARIN Initiatives, the project Multilingual Web and much more. He is also a member of the EACL, ACM, EAMT and several more associations.
A ”Steaua României” (similar to a knight rank) was awarded to him by the president of Romania for his important scientific work.

Current National Initiatives

• There is no LT-specific funding program. The LT R&D (mainly speech) is embedded into AI proposals.
• Currently two large projects are active: “Robots and the Society: Cognitive Systems for Personal Robots and Autonomous Vehicles” (ROBIN) and “Resources and Technologies for the development of man-machine interfaces for Romanian language” (ReTeRom). Both have a significant part related to speech LRs and processing of Romanian.

META-NET White Paper on Romania

Diana Trandabăț, Elena Irimia, Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Dan Cristea, and Dan Tufiș. Limba română în era digitală – The Romanian Language in the Digital Age. META-NET White Paper Series: Europe’s Languages in the Digital Age. Springer, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London, 9 2012. Georg Rehm and Hans Uszkoreit (series editors).

Full text of this META-NET White Paper (PDF)
Additional information on this META-NET White Paper