The
Romanian alphabet is a variant of the
Latin alphabet used by the
Romanian language. It is a modification of the
classical Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters:
The letters Q (read
kü or
chiu), W (
dublu ve), and Y (
igrec or
i grec) were officially introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words and their Romanian derivatives, such as
quasar,
watt, and
yacht. The letter
K, although relatively older, is also rarely used and appears only in proper names and international neologisms such as
kilogram,
broker,
karate. These four letters are still perceived as foreign, which explains their use for stylistic purposes in words such as
nomenklatura (normally
nomenclatura, meaning "nomenclature", but sometimes spelled with a
k to mean the members of the Communist leadership in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, as
Nomenklatura is used in English).