Moldovan language

Moldovan (Latin alphabet: ''limba moldovenească''; Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet: лимба молдовеняскэ), also known historically as Moldavian, is one of the two local names of the Romanian language in Moldova. "Moldovan" is declared the official language in Article 13 of the constitution adopted in 1994, while the 1991 Declaration of Independence of Moldova uses the name "Romanian". In 2003, the Moldovan parliament adopted a law defining "Moldovan" and "Romanian" as glottonyms for the same language. In 2013, the Constitutional Court of Moldova interpreted that Article 13 of the constitution is superseded by the Declaration of Independence, thus giving official status to the name "Romanian". The breakaway region of Transnistria continues to recognize "Moldovan" as one of its official languages, alongside Russian and Ukrainian. Ukraine also makes a distinction between "Moldovan" and Romanian in its law, though Ukrainian officials have announced an intention to remove the legal status of "Moldovan".

The language of the Moldovans had historically been identified by both terms, however, during the Soviet Union, Moldovan, or, as it was called at the time, "Moldavian", was the only term officially recognized. Soviet policy emphasized distinctions between Moldavians and Romanians based on their allegedly different histories. Its resolution declared Moldavian a distinct Romance language from Romanian.

While a majority of inhabitants of the capital city of Chișinău and, according to surveys, people with higher education call their language "Romanian", most rural residents indicated "Moldovan" as their native language in the 2004 census. In schools in Moldova, the term "Romanian language" has been used since independence.

The variety of Romanian spoken in Moldova is the Moldavian subdialect, which is spread approximately within the territory of the former Principality of Moldavia (now split between Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine). Moldavian is considered one of the five major spoken varieties of Romanian. However, all five are written identically, and Moldova and Romania share the same literary language.

The standard alphabet used in Moldova is equivalent to the Romanian alphabet, which is based on the Latin alphabet. Until 1918, varieties of the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet were used. The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet (derived from the Russian alphabet and standardised in the Soviet Union) was used in 1924–1932 and 1938–1989 and remains in use in Transnistria.

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. The Moldovan peasants had grown up in a different political 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. "Moldavian" has also been recorded by the 1960s' Romanian Linguistic Atlas as the answer to the question "What anguagedo you speak?" in parts of Western Moldavia ( Galați and Iași counties).

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 ' — "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 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.

In 1989, the contemporary Romanian version of the Latin alphabet was adopted as the official script of the Moldavian SSR. Legea cu privire la funcționarea limbilor vorbite pe teritoriul RSS Moldovenești nr. 3465-XI din 01.09.89 Vestile nr. 9/217, 1989 (Law regarding the usage of languages spoken on the territory of the Republic of Moldova): "Moldavian SSR supports the desire of the Moldovans that live across the borders of the Republic, and considering the really existing linguistical Moldo-Romanian identity – of the Romanians that live on the territory of the USSR, of doing their studies and satisfying their cultural needs in their mother tongue."

Since independence

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 1993 the Romanian Academy changed the official orthography of the Romanian language, the Institute of Linguistics at the Academy of Sciences of Moldova did not initially make these changes, which however have since been adopted.

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

In 2003, a Moldovan–Romanian dictionary ( (2003)) by Vasile Stati was published aiming to prove that there existed two distinct languages. Reacting to this, 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, , 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 2003, the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova adopted a law defining "Moldovan" and "Romanian" as ''designations'' for the same language ( glottonyms).

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 the latter responses were from rural populations. While the majority of the population in the capital city of Chișinău gave their language as "Romanian", in the countryside more than six-sevenths of the Romanian/Moldovan speakers indicated "Moldovan" as their native language, reflecting historic conservatism.

In schools in Moldova, the term "Romanian language" has been used since independence.

In December 2007, Moldovan president Vladimir Voronin asked for the term to be changed to "Moldovan language", but due to public pressure against that choice, the term was not changed.

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 March 2017, the presidential website 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. The change was reverted on 24 December 2020, the day Maia Sandu assumed office.

In June 2021, during a meeting between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania Bogdan Aurescu and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba, the former asked Ukraine to recognize the inexistence of the Moldovan language to improve the situation of the Romanians in Ukraine. Kuleba responded to this saying that they were trying to do the paperwork for this as soon as possible. On 30 November 2022, during another meeting between Aurescu and Kuleba, Aurescu reiterated this request.

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 , 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 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 "Romanian" for the word "Moldovan", but by adding that "Romanian and Moldovan are the same language". The education minister 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 identified Romanian as their native language, in the countryside 86% of the Romanian/Moldovan speakers indicated Moldovan, a historic holdover. Independent studies found a Moldovan linguistic identity 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%.

In November 2007, 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. Both Cyrillic and, rarely, Latin, were used until after World War I; after Bessarabia was included in Romania in 1918, the Cyrillic alphabet was officially forbidden in the region. In the interwar period, Soviet authorities in the 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 Soviet rule, the new Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet replaced Latin as the official alphabet in Moldova (then Moldavian SSR). In 1989, the Latin script was once again adopted in Moldova by Law 3462 of 31 August 1989, which provided rules for transliterating Cyrillic to Latin, along with the orthographic rules used in Romania at the time. Transnistria, however, uses the Cyrillic alphabet.

Though not immediately adopting these, the Academy of Sciences of Moldova acknowledged both the Romanian Academy's decision of 1993 and the orthographic reform of 2005. In 2000, the Moldovan Academy recommended adopting the spelling rules used in Romania, and in 2010 launched a schedule for the transition to the new rules that was completed in 2011 (regarding its publications). However, these changes were not implemented by Moldova's Ministry of Education, so the old orthographic conventions were maintained in the education sector such as in school textbooks.

On 17 October 2016, Minister of Education Corina Fusu signed Order No. 872 on the application of the revised spelling rules as adopted by the Moldovan Academy of Sciences, coming into force on the day of signing. Since then the spelling used by institutions subordinated to the Ministry of Education is in line with the spelling norms used in Romania since 1993. This order, however, has no application to other government institutions, nor has Law 3462 been amended to reflect these changes; thus, those institutions continue to use the old spelling.

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Distinguishing features

See also

* Eastern Romance substratum
* Legacy of the Roman Empire
* Moldova–Romania relations
* Thraco-Roman
* The Balkan language area

Notes

References

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Further reading

* – About the identity of the contemporary Moldovans in the context of debates about their language.

External links

Chase Faucheux, "Language classification and manipulation in Romania and Moldova"
thesis, 2006, Louisiana State University

Eleonora Rusnac, "Translation of Russian loans and irregularities of the spoken language in the Republic of Moldova"
Association of Professional Translators of Moldova

"Moldova"
''Ethnologue'' report

Academy of Sciences of Moldova
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Moldovan language

Eastern Romance languages
Romanian language
Languages of Moldova
Languages of Ukraine