What Does Raluca Have in Common With Dracula?

The short answer to the question above is: nothing. Except for sharing a few letters and for being both related to Romania, Raluca and Dracula have nothing in common.

The idea for this article came from some (not a few!) incidents in which people not familiar with the name “Raluca”, would call me RaCULA instead. It happened mostly in Germany, but over  time I have gotten this mixup both verbally and in writing many times. It always amused me and I believed that the confusion was caused by an  association with my nationality and the similarity of my name with that of Dracula, a much more famous Romanian name than Raluca.

There is actually a very common linguistic sound switching phenomenon in phonotactics called “metathesis”. When there are phonetic sequences we cannot deal with, but whose swap makes more phonotactic sense, we make the swap to make it make more sense.

In English lots of people say “aks” instead of “ask” because “sk” is hard or we say “iron” as “eye-earn” not “eye-ron” since those vowels are hard to say together.

What’s the story behind Dracula’s name?

I won’t go into the history of Dracula’s myth but will stick to to the name “Dracula”. At its roots, the name has the noun “drac”, which in Romanian literally means devil. Moreover, Vlad the Impaler, the Romanian prince who was later paired  with the Dracula character created by Bram Stoker , was a member of the  Dracul family, he and his father both called Vlad “the Devil”. From Vlad Dracul came  Dracula.

What about Raluca?

Raluca is a Romanian name, 100%. This may explain the difficulty in pronouncing or remembering it. Some remember it if I explain it’s like Luca (from Italian) with and “RA” in front. Or, in Brazil, the easiest way to clarify the spelling and pronunciation of my name is to explain it’s like ”maluca” (the word for crazy in Portuguese) with an “R” instead of the “M”-  people would instantly get it!

Going back to the origin of the name, it seems to have appeared in the territory of Romania at the beginning of the 19^th century, at the same time as the arrival of the Phanariote princes who settled in Wallachia. Actually, the first person known to have the name Ralu (short from Raluca) was the daughter of Ioan Gheorghe Caragea (John Caradja), prince of Wallachia between 1812 and 1818. It is believed that the roots of the name come from the same family of names that include Hera, Heracles, Hercules, which all mean “glory” and “beauty” in Greek.

A picture of Ralu Caragea

Romanian names

Most Romanian names have either Slavic or Latin origin.  Although, some have German or Anglo-Saxon origin, and some even have  Hungarian, Serbian, or Jewish origins. Some of the most common Romanian male names are Vlad, Bogdan, Andrei, Alexandru, Victor, Tudor, Petru, and Ioan, and for females, Ioana, Oana, Andrea, Alexandra, Alina, Adina, Raluca, and Bianca.

So what else have I been called instead of Raluca? Well, the  most memorable are Rucoulla, Relouca, Maluca, Aluca and Luca, of course. My favorite so far is a name given to me by  Joan, a wonderful lady I had the luck of meeting during my last trip around Transylvania. She called me “Dolce Vita”. I like it!