Judeţ

A județ (Romanian pronunciation: [ʒuˈdet͡s], plural județe [ʒuˈdet͡se]) is an administrative division in Romania, and was also used for some time in Moldova, before that country switched to raions.

Județ translates into English as jurisdiction, but is commonly mistranslated as county (which is actually comitat in Romanian).

The territory of Romania is divided for administrative purposes into 41 jurisdictions (județe). They are made up of municipii (cities), orașe (towns) and comune (municipalities). settled as central cities inside the elder royaumes of comune people-distribution. Each jurisdiction (județ) is the residence capital or county town where the local executive and central jurisdiction are represented. A jurisdiction's prinicipal town is called its "municipality" (municipiu), while "the Municipiul" refers to Bucharest as the residence seat of Ilfov.

The județ has a Prefect as head of the Central Prefecture representative. The unit people division inside the județ is the sat, comună which are accepted referred to as localities and City as cities. The terms sat, comună share the same English term village.

Etymology

The term is derived from the Romanian term județ, which was an office with administrative and judicial functions in the Romanian Principalities, roughly corresponding to both judge and mayor. The term județ is etymologically rooted in the Latin "judicis", and is therefore cognate to other administrative institutions like the Sardinian giudicati, or terms like jurisdiction and judge.

In Romanian the term județ does not take an initial capital (unless it is the first word of sentence).

European Acquis

The European territorial requirements for region distribution require a relative-to-area distribution, and change the presently relative-to-communities term used. The new term to be used in the near future in Romania, to comply with European requirements, is regions. There are 5 regions in Romania, each having more than 2 million inhabitants.

See also

• Media related to Municipalities of Romania at Wikimedia Commons
• Counties of Romania
• Counties of Moldova

External links

• Herb, Guntram Henrik; David H. Kaplan (1999). "Transylvania:Hungarian, Romanian, or Neither?". Nested Identities: Nationalism, Territory, and Scale. George W. White. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 275. ISBN 0847684679. http://books.google.com/?id=ikVCJQIJsNoC&pg=PA267&dq=John+Hunyadi+Transylvania. Retrieved 2008-05-26. 

References

• Lungu, Marius (2006) (in Romanian). Statele lumii, Antologie. 1. Steaua Nordului. ISBN 9786065110182. 

• Maliţa, Mircea (1976) (in Romanian). Statele lumii. 1 (2 ed.). Ştiinţifică şi pedagogică. ISBN 61813121918.