Moldovan language

History and politics

The history of the Moldovan language refers to the historical evolution of the glottonym Moldavian/Moldovan in Moldova and beyond. It is closely tied to the region's political status, as during long periods of rule by Russia and the Soviet Union, officials emphasized the language's name as part of separating the Moldovans from those people who began to identify as Romanian in a different nation-building process. Cyrillic script was in use. From a linguistic perspective, "Moldovan" is an alternative name for the varieties of the Romanian language spoken in the Republic of Moldova (see History of the Romanian language).

Before 1918, during the period between the wars, and after the union of Bessarabia with Romania, scholars did not have consensus that Moldovans and the Romanians formed a single ethnic group. Missing out all the important moments in the, The Moldovan peasants had grown up in a different entity and missed the years of creating a pan-Romanian national political consciousness. They identified as Moldovans speaking the language "Moldovan." This caused reactions from pan-Romanian nationalists. The concept of the distinction of Moldovan from Romanian was explicitly stated only in the early 20th century. It accompanied the raising of national awareness among Moldovans, with the Soviets emphasizing distinctions between Moldavians and Romanians.

Major developments since the fall of the Soviet Union include resuming use of a Latin script (rather than Cyrillic letters) in 1989, and several changes in the statutory name of the official language used in Moldova. At one point of particular confusion about identity in the 1990s, all references to geography in the name of the language were dropped, and it was officially known simply as limba de stat — "the state language".

Moldovan was assigned the code mo in ISO 639-1 and code mol in ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3. Since November 2008, these have been deprecated, leaving ro and ron (639-2/T) and rum (639-2/B), the language identifiers as of 2013 to be used for the variant of the Romanian language also known as Moldavian and Moldovan in English, the ISO 639-2 Registration Authority said in explaining the decision.

Reversion to Latin script, and beyond

In 1989 the contemporary Romanian version of the Latin alphabet was adopted as the official script of the Moldavian SSR.

The Declaration of Independence of Moldova (27 August 1991) named the official language as "Romanian." The 1994 constitution, passed under a Communist government, declared "Moldovan" as the state language.

When in 1992 the Romanian Academy changed the official orthography of the Romanian language, the Institute of Linguistics at the Academy of Sciences of Moldova did not make the changes. In 2001 the Moldovan Academy finally adopted the changes introduced by the Romanian Academy.

In 1996 the Moldovan president Mircea Snegur attempted to change the official language back to "Romanian"; the Moldovan Parliament, Communist-dominated, dismissed the proposal as promoting "Romanian expansionism."

In 2003, a Moldovan–Romanian dictionary (Dicționar Moldovenesc–Românesc (2003), by Vasile Stati) was published. The linguists of the Romanian Academy in Romania declared that all the Moldovan words are also Romanian words, although some of its contents are disputed as being Russian loanwords. In Moldova, the head of the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Linguistics, Ion Bărbuță, described the dictionary as "an absurdity, serving political purposes". Stati, however, accused both of promoting "Romanian colonialism". At that point, a group of Romanian linguists adopted a resolution stating that promotion of the notion of a distinct Moldovan language is an anti-scientific campaign.

In the 2004 census, 16.5% (558,508) of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova declared Romanian as their native language, whereas 60% declared Moldovan. Most of those responses were from rural populations. While the majority of the population in the capital city of Chișinău named their language "Romanian", in the countryside more than six-sevenths of the Romanian/Moldovan speakers indicated Moldovan as their native language, reflecting historic conservatism.

In December 2013, the Constitutional Court of Moldova ruled that the Declaration of Independence takes precedence over the Constitution, and that the state language should be called Romanian.

As of January 2016, the presidential site under Igor Dodon has seen the Romanian language option changed to "Moldovan", which is described to be "in accordance with the constitution" by said president.

Controversy

The matter of whether or not "Moldovan" is a separate language continues to be contested politically within and beyond the Republic of Moldova. The 1989 Language Law of the Moldavian SSR, which is still in effect in Moldova, according to the Constitution, asserts a "linguistic Moldo-Romanian identity". Article 13 of the Moldovan Constitution names it "the national language of the country" (the original uses the phrase limba de stat, which literally means the language of the state).

In the breakaway region of Transnistria, Moldovan is declared an official language, together with Ukrainian and Russian.

Standard "Moldovan" is widely considered to be identical to the standard Romanian. Writing about "essential differences", Vasile Stati, supporter of Moldovenism, is obliged to concentrate almost exclusively on lexical rather than grammatical differences. Whatever language distinctions may once have existed, these have been decreasing rather than increasing. King wrote in 2000 that "in the main, Moldovan in its standard form was more Romanian by the 1980s than at any point in its history".

In 2002, the Moldovan Minister of Justice Ion Morei said that Romanian and Moldovan were the same language and that the Constitution of Moldova should be amended to reflect this—not by substituting the word "Moldovan" by "Romanian", but by adding that "Romanian and Moldovan are the same language". The education minister Valentin Beniuc said: "I have stated more than once that the notion of a Moldovan language and a Romanian language reflects the same linguistic phenomenon in essence." The President of Moldova Vladimir Voronin acknowledged that the two languages are identical, but said that Moldovans should have the right to call their language "Moldovan".

In the 2004 census, of the 3.38 million people living in Moldova, 60% identified Moldovan as their native language; 16.5% chose Romanian. While 37% of all urban Romanian/Moldovan speakers identify Romanian as their native language, in the countryside 86% of the Romanian/Moldovan speakers indicated Moldovan as their native language, a historic holdover. Independent studies found a Moldovan linguistic identity was asserted in particular by the rural population and post-Soviet political class. In a survey conducted in four villages near the border with Romania, when asked about their native language the interviewees identified the following: Moldovan 53%, Romanian 44%, Russian 3%.

When reporting on EU Council deliberations regarding an agreement between the European Community and Moldova, the Romanian reporter Jean Marin Marinescu included a recommendation to avoid formal references to the 'Moldovan language.' The Romanian press speculated that the EU banned the usage of the phrase "Moldovan language". However, the European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighbourhood Policy, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, denied these allegations. She said that the Moldovan language is referred to in the 1998 Cooperation Agreement between the EU and Moldova, and hence it is considered a part of the acquis, binding to all member states.

Orthography

The language was generally written in a Romanian Cyrillic alphabet (based on the Old Church Slavonic alphabet) before the 19th century. From then and until World War I, both Old Cyrillic and Latin were used, at which point the Old Cyrillic alphabet fell out of use. In the interwar period, Soviet authorities in Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic alternately used Latin or Cyrillic for writing the language, mirroring the political goals of the moment. Between 1940 and 1989, i.e., during the Soviet rule, the new Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet replaced Latin as the official alphabet in Moldova (then Moldavian SSR). In 1989, the Latin script was adopted in Moldova again, along with the orthographic rules used in Romania at the time, whilst officially Transnistria still uses the Cyrillic alphabet.

Vocabulary

Moldovan is so distinct from Romanian in terms of lexicon, because it contains Russian borrowings and constructions and minor Ukrainian loanwords that is common in colloquial sociolect.