SOUNDS OF THE ROMANIAN LANGUAGE

Voiced Sounds of the Romanian Language

First page

Romanian Language Phonetics

Sounds archive

   Vowels
   Consonants
   Diphthongs
   Sentences
      Standard prosody
      Emotional tones
      Linguistics particularities

Dialectal voices

   Colaboration - Prof. D. Scheianu
   RoToBi System

Protocols

Analysis Instruments

References

Other links

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Vowels

You can listen to the Romanian language vowels

here.
There are many ways to classify vowels classification, varying with the desired goal. Some frequently used classifications are:

1. Opening degree of the oral cavity (the space between tongue and palate).

Close: i, î/â, u
Mid: e, ă, o
Open: a

2. The articulation point:

Anterior: e, î/â, i
Posterior: a, ă, o, u

3. Rounding degree of the lips:

Rounded: o, u
Un-rounded: a, ă, e, i, î/â

4. Oral and nasal character of the sound emission:

The Romanian language has no nasal vowels. Nevertheless, there is some nasalization of vowels in various dialect pronunciations (e.g. when after a vowel, in the same syllable, the n consonant follows, like in crâng, gând - grove, thought), or for expressiveness (e.g. the onomatopoeia pronunciation like in bang ).

Note: The mentioned vowel and consonants classifications are informative. In natural speech, each sound can have different degrees of closing-opening, rounding etc. Often a middle variant appears, depending on the speaker and the general context.

Values for the formants, computed using different analysis tools for isolated or contextualized vowels:

MATHEMATICA^TM demonstrator for basic speech analysis