Romania

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Country Name

Romania.

Location

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.

It shares land borders with Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, and Moldova to the east and has its opening to the Black Sea.

Capital

Bucharest.

Reason for Naming

Romania derives from the Latin Romanus, meaning "citizen of Rome".

Two spelling forms: român and rumân were used interchangeably until sociolinguistic developments in the late 17th century led to grammatical differentiation of the two forms: rumân came to mean "bondsman", while român retained the original ethnolinguistic meaning.

The use of the name Romania to refer to the common homeland of all Romanians—its modern-day meaning—was first documented in the early 19th century.

In English, the name of the country was formerly spelled Rumania or Roumania. Romania became the predominant spelling around 1975.

Romania is also the official English-language spelling used by the Romanian government. A few other languages (including Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Norwegian) have also switched to "o" like English, but most languages continue to prefer forms with u, e.g. French Roumanie, German and Swedish Rumänien, Spanish Rumania (the archaic form Rumanía is still in use in Spain), Polish Rumunia, Russian Румыния (Rumyniya), and Japanese ルーマニア (Rūmania).

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