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Moldovan (Latin alphabet: limba moldovenească, Cyrillic alphabet: лимба молдовеняскэ), an Eastern Romance language, is the official language of Moldova and one of the official languages of the de-facto independent state of Transnistria.

Moldovan, in its official form, is near-identical to Romanian, the official language of Romania and most people in the Republic of Moldova refer to the language most commonly as simply Romanian; according to latest Moldovan census, about 1.2 million (roughly 33%) people in Moldova (excluding Transnistria) declared "Moldovan" as their native language, while the rest considered themselves Romanian speakers.

The term "Moldovan" is also used by some to refer to any Eastern Romance variety native to Moldova (see spoken language below).

History and Politics

Beginnings of "Moldovan"

The territory of Bessarabia, which forms the present-day Republic of Moldova, historically the eastern part of the Romanian principality of Moldavia, has has been disputed between Romania and Russia during most of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was first annexed by Imperial Russia in 1812 and remained part of the Russian Empire for 105 years, until that empire was dissolved following the October revolution of 1917. Bessarabia united with Romania in 1918.

22 years after the Bessarabian union with Romania, in 1940, the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia. A year later, in 1941, Romania invaded the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa and retook Bessarabia (along with a large portion of the Ukraine). These territories were taken back by the Soviet Union 3 years later in 1944, and remained under Soviet administration until the dissolution of the Union in 1991.

As a result of all this back and forth motion, along with ethnic Romanian deportations and the encouraged migration of citizens from the rest of USSR, Bessarabia had large communities of Russian speakers by the mid-20th century, among the ethnic Romanian natives. After World War II, the new Stalinist authorities renamed the language spoken by the majority of Bessarabians as "Moldovan", for the purpose of giving the region its own identity separate from Romania in an attempt to cut any feelings of fraternity towards it.

The Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language was changed to a version of the Cyrillic alphabet derived from the Russian variant. To justify this, the government noted that the first writings in Romanian were in Cyrillic. (See: Moldovan alphabet)

Also, during Soviet rule, Moldovan speakers were encouraged to learn the Russian language, this being a prerequisite for higher education, social status and political power.

Reversion to Latin script, and beyond

In 1989, Moldovan was declared the official language of Moldova, and the pre-1992 Romanian version of the Latin alphabet was restored as the official script.

After the independence of Moldova in 1991, Romanian in Latin script, was declared the official language, but the 1994 constitution changed the name of the language to Moldovan.

A 1996 attempt by the Moldovan president Mircea Snegur to change the official language back to "Romanian" was dismissed by the Moldovan Parliament as promoting Romanian expansionism.

In 2002, the government of Moldova gave the Russian language the same privileges as Moldovan, since after Soviet rule and the massive Russian settlement it invited, a significant proportion of the population is of mother-tongue speakers of Russian. It was declared to be a mandatory foreign language in schools. This created a wave of indignation among the Moldovan-speaking majority of the population, and rallies against this decision were organized in Chişinău and other major cities.

In 2003, a Romanian-Moldovan dictionary (authored by Vasile Stati) was published, suggesting that the two countries speak different languages. The linguists of the Romanian Academy in Romania declared that all the Moldovan words are also Romanian words. Even in Moldova, the head of the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Linguistics, Ion Bărbuţă, described the dictionary as an "absurdity", serving political purposes.

On the 2004 census, about two thirds of the Romanian-Moldovans, which are the majority population in the Republic of Moldova, declared their mother tongue to be "Romanian", and one third "Moldovan", which is, according to the press, why the release of the official census results was delayed.

Soviet-era theories

In the Soviet era, some linguists postulated that Moldovan was actually a Slavic language with a strong Vlachian (i.e. Romanian) superstratum.

Although similar theories have been fielded for other languages, this proposal is now believed to have been made to serve political purposes only, and nobody has provided any evidence so-far towards the idea that Moldovan and Romanian are not from common linguistic stock. Strong evidence to the contrary is the fact that they are nearly identical.

Romanian vs. Moldovan

The constitution of the Republic of Moldova refers to the country's language as Moldovan rather than Romanian, though in practice it is often called "Romanian". The law that officialized the Moldovan language and the 1989 law that changed the alphabet back from Cyrillic to Latin both state that Moldovan is identical to Romanian. In schools, the language is called Romanian and it is taught with textbooks from Romania. The Academy of Sciences of Moldova calls the language Romanian (). Also, in 2004, the Moldovan Minister of Justice, Ion Morei, said that Romanian and Moldovan are the same language and that the Constitution of Moldova should be amended, not necessarly by changing the word Moldovan into Romanian, but by adding that "Romanian and Moldovan are the same language". Ethnologue's Moldova page and the U.S. Department of State both say that Romanian is the official language of Moldova.

Actual differences

Alphabet

Cyrillic was replaced by Latin as the official alphabet for the Moldovan language in 1989. Nearly all urban Moldovans can read the Latin alphabet, although many over 30 are more comfortable writing in Cyrillic, as it was the script of their education. In the countryside, many people over 30 — especially peasants — are barely literate at all in Latin, and prefer Cyrillic.

Spelling

Romanian â and î are both written as î in Moldovan. Although they sound identical, the Romanian justification for start using this spelling in 1992 is to bring Romanian closer orthographically to other Romance languages, and that etymologically, â and î are separate. In the Moldovan language, only the word "română" (Romanian) and "România" (Romania) are written with â, officially.

Romanian sunt is written as sînt in Moldovan. However, in Moldovan Cyrillic, it is variably written sunt or sînt.

However, in both countries, the official versions are not always respected. For example, some Romanian newspapers use the "î"/"sînt" spelling (Evenimentul Zilei, Academia Caţavencu among others), while some Moldovan newspapers use "î/â/sunt" spelling. (Accente, Garda, etc).

Only very rarely are "română" and derivatives are written using "î", and most people from either country will consider it to be incorrect usage.

Spoken language

The Moldovan slang of Chisinau and its suburbs tends to use a much higher number of Russian and Ukrainian loanwords than in Romania. However, Moldovan speakers generally avoid Russian loanwords when writing their language in most contexts. Residents of rural areas tend to use less slang and foreign words, and their speech is reported to be more conservative than that of residents of urban areas.

In Chişinău, most strangers, even ethnic Romanians, address one another in Russian, despite the fact that Moldovan is official. In the autonomous regions of Gagauzia and Transnistria, Russian predominates while Moldovan is spoken by a minority.

The spoken language of the cities is an amalgamation of Romanian and Russian, which has been called a "jargon" by some, although it could perhaps be called a creole since it is the native variety for some. Only some nationally-conscious members of the elite urban intelligentsia make any effort to purge Russian words from their speech. In the countryside, Russian linguistic influences tend to be far fewer, excepting the regions of Gagauzia and Transnistria. Speakers of Moldovan tend to code-switch their language with Russian.

For example, common slang among youngsters even of Romanian heritage uses "crasavic" to mean "beautiful" (from Russian красавец (m)/красавица (f)), where the official written language uses "frumos".

Among younger speakers, situational code switching is common, especially among people of Russian and Ukrainian heritage, and even moreso among the children of mixed marriages. It's also common in situations where one person's native language is Moldovan/Romanian and the other person's native language is Russian, for each person to speak in his native language even though the other person responds in the other language. This often results in some degree of intentional grammatical simplification (or "foreigner talk", as it is sometimes known due to intentional grammatical simplification often used when speaking to foreigners), and a higher frequency of borrowing words from the other language than in normal discourse.

Examples of bilingual code switching or other contact linguistic phenomena (what is occurring here is debatable); Romanian words in italics, Russian words in bold:

Latin: Vseo eu m'am dus!

Cyrillic: Всё еу м'ам дус!

Latin: Vină încoace cac deneoc proşel...

Cyrillic: Винэ ынкоаче как денёк прошел...

Such phenomena are rarely found in writing, except when such a conversation is being transcribed, or occasionally in IM and forums. When such phenomena are found in writing, it is more common for them to be in Cyrillic than in Latin.

Notes

1. The Cyrillic script has not been in official use in the Republic of Moldova since independence 1989, but is official in Transnistria, and is still used by smaller groups elsewhere
2. The Romanian language, considered by most people to be identical to Moldovan, is spoken by approximately 26 million people worldwide. According to the 2004 census in Moldova, 2.4 million people said they speak "Romanian" while only 1.2 million people said they speak "Moldovan".
3. While the Romanian language in Romania officially uses the â/î/sunt orthography as described in the article, it used the exact same orthography as Moldovan (î/sînt) during its Communist regime. The â/î/sunt decision was made by the Romanian Academy in the 1990's.

External links

• Moldovan (Cyrillic) alphabet and pronunciation
• Constitutional Court of Transnistria site in Moldovan-Cyrillic (куртя конституционалэ)

References

• Dyer, D. (1999). The romanian dialect of moldova: a study in language and politics. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. (ISBN 0773480374)
• Dyer, Donald Leroy, ed. Studies in Moldovan. New York: Columbia University Press (East European Monographs), 1996. (ISBN 0880333510)
• Stati, V.N. Dicţionar moldovenesc-românesc. Chisinau: Tipografia Centrala (Biblioteca Pro Moldova), 2003. (ISBN 9975782485)
• Ильяшенко, Татиьяна Павловна. Языковые контакты : на материале славиано-молдав, отношений. Moscow: "Наука" , 1970. (LCCN 78510414)
• Афтени, М.К., Батыр, Л.К., Богач, И.И. (1961). Молдавско-русский словарь. Moscow, USSR: Государственное издательство иностранных и национальных словарей. (LCCN 62045065)
• Ецко, И.И. (1987). Молдавско-русский словарь. Kishinev, Moldavian SSR: МСЭ . (LCCN 88112743)
• Баскаков, Н.А. (1973). Гагаузско-русско-молдавский словарь. Moscow, USSR: Unknown. (LCCN 73355147)
• Bruchis, M. (1982). One Step Back, Two Steps Forward. New York: Columbia University Press (East European Monographs). (ISBN 0880330023)
• Bruchis, M. (1984). Nations, Nationalities, Peoples. New York: Columbia University Press (East European Monographs). (ISBN 0880330570)
• Bruchis, M. (1988). USSR Language and Realities. New York: Columbia University Press (East European Monographs). (ISBN 088033147X)
• Dumbrava, V. (2004). Sprachkonflikt Und Sprachbewusstsein In Der Republik Moldova: Eine Empirische Studie In Gemischtethnischen Familien (Sprache, Mehrsprachigkeit Und Sozialer Wandel). Bern: Peter Lang Publishing. (ISBN 3631507283)
• http://www.contrafort.md/2002/90-91/338_7.html
• http://reference.allrefer.com/country-guide-study/moldova/moldova27.html
• http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/modern_languages/Dyer.html
• http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/oldworld/europe/moldavia.html
• http://www.east-west-wg.org/cst/cst-mold/

• Moldova
• Languages of Moldova
• Romanian language