Romanian Accents & Special Letters Cheatsheet

Romanian adds five letters to the Latin alphabet: ă with a breve, â and î with circumflexes, and ș and ț with commas below. The first three are vowels and straightforward. The last two are the source of one of the most persistent encoding problems in European computing, and it is worth understanding because it affects whether Romanian text displays and searches correctly.

Romanian ș and ț take a comma below, not a cedilla. The cedilla forms ş and ţ belong to Turkish, where ş is a genuine Turkish letter. For years Unicode had only the cedilla versions, and Romanian text was written with them out of necessity. The correct comma-below characters were added at U+0218, U+0219, U+021A and U+021B, and Romanian standards and Microsoft's Romanian layouts moved to them, but an enormous amount of existing text and many older fonts still use the cedilla forms. The result is that Romanian text routinely mixes both, and a search for ștefan will not match Ştefan unless the system normalises them.

If you are handling Romanian data, treat the cedilla and comma forms as equivalent when matching, and prefer the comma forms when writing new text. If a font renders the comma versions as blank boxes, it is an old font rather than wrong text — most modern system fonts have supported them for over a decade.

The two circumflex vowels â and î sound identical, and which one you write is decided by position, a rule that has changed twice politically. Since the 1993 Academy ruling, î is used at the beginning and end of a word and â in the middle: început, coborî, român, mâine. The communist-era convention used î almost everywhere, which is why older books write romîn. The current rule is the one taught and expected today, and the compound rule matters too: neînceput keeps the î because the root begins with it.

On Windows, use the Romanian Standard layout rather than Alt codes — it maps ă, â, î, ș and ț to the keys right of the letters and produces the correct comma-below forms. If you need codes, ă is Alt+0227 and â is Alt+0226 in the Central European codepage, but the comma-below letters have no reliable Alt code, which is another reason to switch layouts. On macOS, choose the Romanian Standard input source; holding a, i or s opens pickers with the right variants. On Linux, select the Romanian layout with the standard variant, which defaults to comma-below correctly.