Folks, is Romania considered Eastern Europe?
Yes.
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THANK YOU.
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Depends on how you define Eastern Europe (which has changed a few times over the last 100 years or so).
I’d say that no matter how you define it though Romania would be there since it was a communist country after WWII and the main religion is Eastern Orthodox,
It’s a little marginal because of the Balkan influence – it’s not technically part of the Balkan peninsula but the language has a number of Balkan features.
But yeah, eastern for me.
Isn’t Romanian a Romance language, while most Balkan languages are Slavic?
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Yes, Romanian is similar to Italian. But only a bit more than half of Balkan languages are Slavic – non-Slavic are Greek, Albanian and Romanian vs. Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian and Croatian.
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Balkan is an area classification not a genetic one, it includes reduced or no infinitive usage (you say “I want that I go” rather than “I want to go”, post-posed articles (house-the instead of ‘the house’, a future tense transparently related to the verb ‘to want’ and a few other features. There’s some Turkish influence too (mostly in Albanian and Bulgarian).
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Yes. 🙂
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Uh, I’ve no idea how that link showed up in my comment above. Probably managed to fatfinger something.
Kinda curious about why you’re asking us if Romania is part of EE, btw
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I’m working on an index for my book, and there are some Romanian characters in the novels I discuss. So I wondered if I could group them together with other Eastern Europeans.
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I’ve been having that poll link too and thought it was just me.
https://polldaddy.com/js/rating/rating.js
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It’s been appearing in comments in my app for over a year. I haven’t been able to figure it out.
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Do you want a geographic or a political answer?
Politically, I’d say yes for Romania, as it was part of the Eastern Bloc, and this is the meaning the vast majority of people in the US have in mind (Western Europe — good; Northern Europe — we are not worthy; Eastern Europe — everything else that is not obviously in the Mediterranean, like Greece).
Geographically, a place like the Czech Republic is clearly central Europe, even though politically most people would associate it with the former Eastern Bloc. I’d say Romania would geographically be Central or Southern Europe.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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