In all cities and towns you should have little trouble communicating in English, although Italian will occasionally serve you better. In villages, you may have difficulty communicating with older people, but young people who have attended school in the post-Communist dispensation usually understand English. Don't shy away from conversations that hinge on a vocabulary of just a few words.
Although there is a fairly sizeable Hungarian minority that continues to use its own language in schools and civil administration, a small Gypsy community that speaks Roma, and a few dwindling communities descended from the Saxons who settled in Transylvania centuries ago that speak German, Romanian is the official language.
Romanian is a Romance language, evolved from the Latin spoken in ancient times by the people in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. Structurally complex, it will sound familiar to if you speak or understand Italian, Spanish, French or Portuguese. The language uses a Latin alphabet, with a few modified characters; these are â (also written as î, and pronounced "uh"), a (pronounced "er"), s (pronounced "sh"), and t (pronounced "ts").
