Pronouncing Loanwords and Letters q, w, y, k, x

Romanian's twenty-six-letter alphabet contains four letters — k, q, w, y — that a native word will essentially never use. They survive only because the language borrows: from Greek and Latin scholarship, from international science, and above all from English. Alongside them sits x, a fully native letter that nonetheless behaves in two ways depending on its surroundings. This page covers the marginal letters and, more importantly, the one corner of Romanian where the otherwise reliable "read what you see" principle breaks down: recent foreign loans, especially English ones, that keep a foreign pronunciation the spelling does not predict.

k — the imported /k/

The letter k stands for plain /k/, exactly like the hard c. Romanian simply prefers to write the sound with c (or ch before e/i), so k turns up only in borrowed vocabulary that arrived with its spelling intact: kilogram, kilometru, karate, kaki (khaki), kaizer, kiwi. The pronunciation holds no surprises — it is the same /k/ you already know.

Note that many words that could take k are instead spelled with c once they settle into the language: chilogram coexists with kilogram, and older borrowings are fully nativized (chioșc, kiosk, from a root others spell with k). When in doubt, the dictionary spelling decides; the sound is /k/ either way.

q — almost always /kw/, and almost always foreign

The letter q is the rarest of all. It appears in a tiny set of unassimilated borrowings and scientific terms — quasar, quark, quorum (often respelled cvorum), squash — where it carries the /kw/ value of the source word. There is no native Romanian word with q. If you see one, you are looking at a loan, and you read it as in the donor language.

w — /v/ in older loans, /w/ in English ones

w splits in two by origin. In older, German- or Latin-derived borrowings it is read as /v/: watt /vat/, wolfram /ˈvolfram/ (tungsten), wagon in some spellings. In the flood of more recent English borrowings it keeps the English /w/: week-end /ˈwikend/, whisky /ˈwiski/, western /ˈwestern/, workshop. There is no clean rule that predicts which value a given w takes — it tracks the word's history, so you learn it word by word.

y — usually /i/, sometimes /j/

y (called i grec, "Greek i") most often stands for the vowel /i/, as in hobby /ˈhobi/, yoga /ˈjoɡa/ (here the first sound is the glide), whisky /ˈwiski/, dandy. In a few words it carries the consonantal glide /j/ at the start of a syllable: yală /ˈjalə/ (a Yale-type lock), yală, yacht /jot/, yankeu. The default for an English speaker is safe: read y as a Romanian i unless it begins the word in front of a vowel, where it tends toward /j/.

x — the native letter with two faces

Unlike the other four, x is a normal part of native vocabulary, and it is the one that most rewards a precise rule. The letter spells the cluster /ks/ by default — but in the prefix ex- before a vowel it voices to /ɡz/, matching the same alternation English has in exit /ks/ versus exact /ɡz/. Note the rule is about the prefix, not merely "between vowels": taxi, maxim, oxigen all sit between vowels yet keep /ks/.

• /ks/ — the default: word-finally, before a consonant, word-initially, and intervocalically outside ex-: box /boks/, taxi /ˈtaksi/, expres /eksˈpres/, xilofon /ksiloˈfon/, maxim /ˈmaksim/, oxigen /oksiˈdʒen/.
• /ɡz/ — in the prefix ex- immediately before a vowel: examen /eɡˈzamen/, exact /eɡˈzakt/, exemplu /eɡˈzemplu/, exercițiu /eɡzerˈt͡ʃit͡siu/, exista /eɡzisˈta/.

The real exception: English loans that aren't read phonetically

Here is the heart of the page, and the only place Romanian's phonemic-spelling promise breaks. A wave of recent English borrowings — technology, business, pop culture — has entered the language with its English spelling and an approximated English pronunciation, rather than being respelled or read letter by letter. Computer is not "com-pu- TER" with Romanian vowels; it is roughly /kompiˈuter/ or /kɒmˈpjuter/, keeping the English shape. Weekend, smartphone, site (= website), mouse, trend, briefing, team-building, shopping, job all behave this way. The vowels and stress come from English, not from the Romanian rules you have learned.

Note also that these loans often take Romanian inflection with a hyphen that preserves the foreign root: site-ul (the site), mouse-ul (the mouse), link-uri (links), job-uri (jobs). The ending is Romanian, the stem stays English. There is no way to predict the pronunciation of such a word from its letters — you have to know the English source. This is the genuine, unavoidable exception to the otherwise tidy Romanian sound–spelling fit.

Source-language comparison

For an English speaker the loanwords are a relief and a trap at once. The relief: you already know how to say weekend, computer, smartphone, so you don't have to "translate" them into Romanian sounds — and you shouldn't. The trap is the opposite reflex: applying English values to the native letters. English x and Romanian x happen to agree (the /ks/–/ɡz/ split is the same), which is lucky, but English y as in happy won't help with yală, and English w (water) collides with the /v/ of watt. The rule of thumb: read native Romanian words by the Romanian rules, and read transparent foreign loans by their source — and learn which words are which.

Common Mistakes

Don't read recent English loans phonetically letter by letter:

Don't keep x as /ks/ in the ex- prefix before a vowel — it voices to /ɡz/:

Don't read every w as English /w/ — scientific loans use /v/:

Don't add a syllable to a final-e English loan:

Don't assume q is native — it always signals a foreign word:

Key Takeaways

• k, q, w, y are essentially loanword-only letters; native Romanian writes /k/ as c / ch.
• k = /k/; q = /kw/ (always foreign); y = /i/, or /j/ before a vowel.
• w = /v/ in older/scientific loans (watt), /w/ in English ones (weekend) — learned word by word.
• x = /ks/ by default (box, expres, and even intervocalic taxi, maxim, oxigen), but /ɡz/ in the prefix ex- before a vowel (examen, exact, exemplu) — exactly like English.
• Recent English loans (computer, weekend, smartphone, site) are the one place Romanian abandons phonemic spelling: read them by their English source, not letter by letter.