Romanian grammar

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, namely Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian.

As a Romance language, Romanian shares many characteristics with its more distant relatives: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, etc. However, Romanian has preserved certain features of Latin grammar that have been lost elsewhere. This could be explained by a host of factors such as: relative isolation in the Balkans, possible pre-existence of identical grammatical structures in its substratum (as opposed to the substrata over which the other Romance languages developed), 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. Nevertheless, declensions have been reduced to only three forms (nominative/accusative, genitive/dative, and vocative) from the original six or seven. Another, that is only seen marginally in other Romance languages such as Italian, is the retention of the neuter gender in nouns.^[1]

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.^{[2][3][4][5][6][7]}