You Say Moldovan, I Say Romanian: The Politics of Language in Moldova

Graffiti in Moldova, which reads: “I am Moldovan! I speak Moldovan!” Image source: "What language do they speak in Moldova?".

by Morgan Fox

Morgan Fox is in the second year of the dual MA Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and MS Library and Information Science degrees. She works in Acquisitions and Cataloging Services in the Main Library, where she catalogs Slavic and other area-related language materials, and hopes to continue working in Slavic cataloging after graduating. Previously she received a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (2021) from the Ohio State University. She wrote this blog post in 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023.

In a world where national boundaries are often drawn and conceptualized around titular ethnolinguistic majorities (French people and the French language in France, etc.), what is to be made of nations that share a language, albeit with certain regional or dialectical differences, such as German in Germany and Austria? And what about countries that speak the same language but call it vastly different names?

Such is the case of Moldovan, or rather, the Romanian language as spoken in Moldova. A great wealth of linguistic research exists that points to the relatedness of Moldovan to Romanian, and Donald Dyer has even compared online reference resources about how they present the Moldovan language,[1]so we need not belabor this fact here. Suffice it to say that, scientifically, Moldovan is essentially the same language as Romanian, at most a mutually intelligible dialect, with its own regional differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, as generally happens with regional variation within languages. But how did this happen? Why two words for one language? Is Moldovan simply Romanian written in Cyrillic (or, at least, until recently)? How do we define Moldova linguistically?

The astute reader should be asking themselves, “Who exactly is ‘we’?” The use of “we” implies a collective entity, removed from Moldova, making definitions about Moldova and, assumedly, without its input. “We” is the global community minus Moldova. But shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t Moldova be the one to define itself linguistically?

Unfortunately, the question of national language is precisely the problem Moldova can’t seem to solve. Nor is it one that the external “we” is going to solve, either, nor should we, chiefly because, for the majority of Moldovan history, it has been the external others who have defined the very meaning of Moldovanness. Moldova, as we know it today, has only truly existed and belonged to itself for thirty years, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the question of the Moldovan language has been a problem for roughly the same amount of time, if not actually longer. In an overly simplistic linguistic-historical survey, Moldova was originally Moldavia, and the inhabitants spoke Moldavian, a variety of what we today would call Romanian, an eastern Romance language in Latin script. In the 16th century Moldavia fell under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, which spoke Turkish and used Arabic script, while at the same time the Russian Empire, with its Slavic language and Cyrillic script, was making advances in the area. The region pingponged back and forth between the Ottomans and the Russians through the series of Russo-Turkish Wars, before “returning” to Romania following WWI, only to be reincorporated into the Soviet Union thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Front page of Kultura Moldovei, April 12, 1962, featuring Moldovan Cyrillic.

And here the great Moldovan language problem is created. Separated as it was from the area that would become Romania, Moldova “missed out on all the defining moments in the emergence of a pan-Romanian national consciousness” (King 120), and therefore did not think of itself as Romanian — a fact that the Soviet Union was quick to exploit. Because what better way to influence a people’s ethnocultural identity than to convince them that they are different from their neighbors, and what better way to do that than through their language? Similar to the amount of scholarship on the relatedness of Moldovan and Romanian, much has been written about the Soviet engineering of the Moldovan language, to the point where it is almost cited as the most successful example of Soviet state building.

And the Soviet effect runs deep. Moldovan and Romanian might be the same language, but in the post-Soviet space people are still fighting for the concept of the Moldovan language.[2] In his article, “Language and Ideology in the Print Media of Post-Soviet Moldova,” Matthew Ciscel remarks on a typographical error in the title of a pro-Russian Moldovan newspaper, an incorrect transliteration that changes the Romanian word for “and” from și to șu, an easy error to make since the Cyrillic и, particularly in italics, looks more like a u than an i (Ciscel 28-29). It’s the type of substitution that makes anyone who regularly works with Cyrillic transliteration groan, not because it annoys them, which it does, but because they are all too aware of how easy a mistake it is to make and tend to be the ones who make said mistake the most (please, ask me how many times I’ve accidentally transliterated the Cyrillic у as y and not u). But in the context of defining a national language amidst an ethno-national identity crisis, this simple mistake is enough for the uncritical and unquestioning observer to shout, “There’s your proof that Romanian and Moldovan are not the same language!” It’s the sort of debate where the word “irredentism” (or, the advocation for returning territory previously “belonging” to a country to that country) gets thrown around a lot — Romanian irredentism on one side, Soviet-cum-Russian on the other, and Moldova in the middle.

Model of the monument to the Romanian language (Source)

Meanwhile, at least administratively, Romanian is gaining the upper hand. After the language discrepancies between the Constitution (“Moldovan”) and the Declaration of Independence (“Romanian”), revisions have been made to designate either the relatedness of the two languages or outright fixing the use of Moldovan for Romanian. August 31st is a national holiday to the Romanian language (“Limba noastră”), and there were plans to build a monument to the Romanian language in the middle of Chișinău, except as of 2014 it has yet to be realized.[3]

But while the monument to the Romanian language remains unbuilt, in mid-March, 2023, the Moldovan Parliament passed a bill officially declaring the state language to be Romanian, which was soon put into effect by Moldovan President Maia Sandu. It should come as no surprise that the bill was put forward by the pro-Western Action and Solidarity Party (PAS) and disputed by the pro-Russian Communists and Socials’ Bloc (BCS).[4] Nor should the timing be ignored, after a year of active war in neighboring Ukraine. While designating the name of the national language might seem simply symbolic, calling the language Romanian aligns Moldova with the West and the EU. It’s another step away from Moscow’s influence for another former Soviet state. Now if only we knew what will happen in Transnistria.

[1] See Dyer.
[2] See again Dyer.
[3] See “Romanian Language Monument.”
[4] See Tanas.

Works Cited

Ciscel, Matthew. “Language and Ideology in the Print Media of Post-Soviet Moldova.” Balkanistica, 

            vol. 17, 2004, pp. 23-42.

Dyer, Donald. “‘I Don’t Care If It Is True, I Don’t Believe It!’: The Linguistic Shibboleth of Moldovan.” Balkanistica, vol. 32, no.2, 2019, pp.19-44.

 

King, Charles. “The Ambivalence of Authenticity, or How the Moldovan Language Was Made.” Slavic Review, vol. 58, no. 1, 1999, pp. 117–42. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2307/2672992.

 

“Romanian Language Monument not yet inaugurated.” IPN Press Agency, 18 Sept. 2014, www.ipn.md/en/romanian-language-monument-not-yet-inaugurated-7967_1015357.html. Accessed May 16 2023.

 

Tanas, Alexander. “Moldovan parliament approves law on Romanian language.” Reuters, 16 Mar. 2023, www.reuters.com/world/europe/moldovan-parliament-approves-law-romanian-language-2023-03-16/. Accessed May 16 2023.