Legal and Bureaucratic Style

Romanian limbaj administrativ-juridic — the language of laws, contracts, court rulings, official letters, and the forms you fill in at any primărie — is the most distinctive register in the language, and the one furthest from how anyone actually speaks. Its entire design serves a single goal: to sound impersonal, authoritative, and agent-free, as if the text issued from the institution itself rather than from any human author. To achieve this it leans on a small inventory of grammatical devices — the se-passive, the supine of obligation, runaway nominalization — and an even more important inventory of frozen formulae that recur verbatim across millions of documents. The practical lesson for a learner is double-edged: you must be able to read this register (you will meet it in every official document), but you must resist imitating it when plain communication is wanted, because outside its proper home it reads as evasive, pompous, or comic.

The se-passive: actions with no actor

The single most pervasive feature is the impersonal/passive se construction. Instead of naming who decides, approves, or establishes something, the text uses the reflexive se with a third-person verb, leaving the agent unstated: se aprobă "is approved," se stabilește "is established," se constată "it is found." The effect is that decisions appear to make themselves — which is precisely the authority an institution wants to project.

Notice that nowhere does a Ministerul or a judecătorul appear as a grammatical subject. Where ordinary Romanian would say Comisia a aprobat bugetul ("The commission approved the budget"), officialese prefers Se aprobă bugetul. This is a deliberate choice, not clumsiness: agentlessness is the whole point.

The supine of obligation: urmează a fi depus

The second engine of this register is the supine and the long infinitive in a used to express obligation and procedure. Where everyday Romanian uses trebuie să ("must") or the subjunctive, bureaucratic style reaches for urmează a fi… / este de… / se cuvine a… — constructions that again strip out the person who must act.

In plain Romanian you would say Trebuie să depuneți documentele ("You must submit the documents") — but that names you, the actor. Urmează a fi depuse names no one. The supine here is doing the same agent-deleting work as the se-passive, through a different grammatical door.

Nominalization to the extreme

Officialese converts verbs into nouns wherever it can. Instead of a hotărî "to decide" it writes în vederea adoptării hotărârii "with a view to the adoption of the decision"; instead of a nu plăti "to not pay" it writes neplata "the non-payment." Each verb that becomes a noun removes a clause that would otherwise need a subject — so nominalization, too, is a tool for impersonality. The result is a dense chain of genitives.

Frozen formulae: the fixed phrases that signal the register

More than any single grammatical device, what makes a text bureaucratic is its vocabulary of set phrases, used verbatim. Knowing these is most of reading comprehension for this register.

Archaic and elevated prepositions

The register preserves prepositions that have nearly vanished from ordinary speech, where they sound stiff or literary. Asupra ("upon, concerning," + genitive), întru ("in, into," elevated), and spre ("toward," in the sense of purpose) carry an old, official weight.

Why it is deliberately impersonal

It would be easy to dismiss all this as bad writing, but the impersonality is functional and intentional. A law or ruling must appear to bind everyone equally and to emanate from the institution, not from a fallible individual. The se-passive, the supine of obligation, and nominalization all delete the human agent so that the text reads as an objective statement of how things are and must be, rather than what some person wants. The numbered clauses (Art. 1, alin. (2), lit. a) serve the same end: they make the text a structured object that can be cited precisely, line by line, in other documents. The cost is enormous loss of readability — which is exactly why Romania, like other countries, periodically runs limbaj clar ("plain language") campaigns urging officials to write so that citizens can actually understand them.

When NOT to imitate it

This register has exactly one proper home: formal legal, contractual, and administrative documents. Carried anywhere else, it backfires. An email to a colleague written în temeiul discuției noastre sounds absurd; a personal letter full of sus-numitul and urmează a fi reads as cold or sarcastic. Even within formal writing, an essay or report wants the cleaner formal register or academic register, not officialese. Reach for these constructions only when you are literally drafting or echoing a legal/administrative text — and recognize that doing so to ordinary readers is a failure of communication, not a display of competence.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Romanian officialese (limbaj administrativ-juridic) is engineered to be impersonal and agent-free, projecting institutional authority.
• Three grammatical engines do the agent-deleting: the se-passive (se aprobă, se stabilește), the supine of obligation (urmează a fi depus, este de respins), and extreme nominalization (nedepunerea, soluționarea).
• Its real signature is the frozen formula: în temeiul, în conformitate cu, având în vedere, prezentul/prezenta, sus-numitul, drept pentru care, prin prezenta.
• It preserves archaic/elevated prepositions — asupra, întru, spre — that have left ordinary speech.
• Use it only inside genuine legal/administrative documents; imitating it elsewhere reads as evasive or comic. For ordinary formal needs, use the plain formal or academic register instead.