History of the Moldovan language

The history of the Moldovan language refers to the historical evolution of the glottonym Moldavian/Moldovan. From a linguistic perspective, this term is an alternative name for the Romanian language spoken in the Repubic of Moldova (see History of the Romanian language).

Early usage

In old sources, such as the works of chroniclers Grigore Ureche (1590 - 1647), Miron Costin (1633 - 1691), or those of the Prince and scholar Dimitrie Cantemir (1673 – 1723), the term Moldavian (moldovenească) can be found. According to Cantemir's Descriptio Moldaviae, the inhabitants of Wallachia and Transylvania spoke the same language as Moldavians, but they had a different pronunciation and used some words not understood by Moldovans. Costin and, in an unfinished book, Cantemir attest the usage of the term Romanian among the inhabitants of the Principality of Moldavia to refer to their own language.

Moldavian in Imperial Russia

Following annexation of Bessarabia by Russia (after 1812), Moldavian was established as an official language in the governmental institutions of Bessarabia, used along with Russian, as 95% of the population was Romanian. The publishing works established by Archbishop Gavril Bănulescu-Bodoni were able to produce books and lithurgical works in Moldavian between 1815-1820.

Gradually, the Russian language gained importance. The new code adopted in 1829 abolished the autonomous statute of Bessarabia, and halted the obligatory use of Moldavian in public pronouncements. In 1854, Russian was declared the only official language of the region, Moldavian being eliminated from schools in the second part of the century

According to the dates provided by the administration of Bessarabia, since 1828, official documents were published in Russian only, and around 1835 a 7-year term was established during which state institutions would accept acts in the Romanian language.

Romanian was accepted as the language of instruction until 1842, afterwards being taught as a separate subject. Thus, at the seminary of Chişinău, the Romanian language was a compulsory subject, with 10 hours weekly, until 1863, when the Department of Romanian was closed. At the High School No.1 in Chişinău, students had the right to choose among Romanian, German, and Greek until 9 February 1866, when the State Counselor of the Russian Empire forbade teaching of the Romanian language, with the following justification: "the pupils know this language in the practical mode, and its teaching follows other goals".

Around 1871, the tsar published an ukase "On the suspension of teaching the Romanian language in the schools of Bessarabia," because "local speech is not taught in the Russian Empire".

The linguistic situation in Bessarabia from 1812 to 1918 was the gradual development of bilingualism. Russian continued to develop as the official language of privilege, whereas Romanian remained the principal vernacular. The evolution of this linguistic situation can be divided into five phases.

Phase one: 1812 to 1828

The period from 1812 to 1828 was one of neutral or functional bilingualism. Whereas Russian had official dominance, Romanian was not without influence, especially in the spheres of public administration, education (particularly religious education) and culture. In the years immediately following the annexation, loyalty to Romanian language and customs became important. The Theological Seminary (Seminarul Teologic) and Lancaster Schools were opened in 1813 and 1824 respectively, Romanian grammar books were published, and the printing press at Chişinău began producing religious books.

Phase two: 1828 to 1843

The period from 1828 to 1843 was one of partial diglossic bilingualism. During this time, use of Romanian was forbidden in the sphere of administration. This was carried out through negative means: Romanian was excluded from the civil code. Romanian continued to be used in education, but only as a separate subject. Bilingual manuals, such as the Russian-Romanian Bucoavne grammar of Iacob Ghinculov, were published to meet the new need for bilingualism. Religious books and Sunday sermons remained the only monolingual public outlet for Romanian. By 1843, the removal of Romanian from public administration was complete.

According to the Organic Statute of 1828, the Moldovan language was also the official language of Ottoman-dominated Moldavia.

Phase three: 1843 to 1871

The period from 1843 to 1871 was one of assimilation. Romanian continued to be a school subject at the Liceul Regional (high school) until 1866, at the Theological Seminary until 1867, and at regional schools until 1871, when all teaching of the language was forbidden by law.

Phase four: 1871 to 1905

The period from 1871 to 1905 was one of official monolingualism in Russian. All public use of Romanian was phased out, and substituted with Russian. Romanian continued to be used as the colloquial language of home and family. This was the era of the highest level of assimilation in the Russian Empire. In 1872, the priest Pavel Lebedev ordered that all church documents be written in Russian, and, in 1882, the press at Chişinău was closed by order of the Holy Synod.

Phase five: 1905 to 1917

The period from 1905 to 1917 was one of increasing linguistic conflict, with the re-awakening of Romanian national consciousness. In 1905 and 1906, the Bessarabian zemstva asked for the re-introduction of Romanian in schools as a "compulsory language", and the "liberty to teach in the mother language (Romanian language)". At the same time, the first Romanian language newspapers and journals began to appear: Basarabia (1906), Viaţa Basarabiei (1907), Moldovanul (1907), Luminătorul (1908), Cuvînt moldovenesc (1913), Glasul Basarabiei (1913). From 1913, the synod permitted that "the churches in Besserabia use the Romanian language".

The term "Moldovan language" (limbă moldovenească) was newly employed to create a state-sponsored Ausbausprache to distinguish it from 'Romanian' Romanian. Thus, Şt. Margeală, in 1827, stated that the aim of his book was to "offer the 800,000 Romanians who live in Bessarabia,... as well as to the millions of Romanians from the other part of Prut, the possibility of knowing the Russian language, and also for the Russians who want to study the Romanian language". In 1865 Ioan Doncev, editing his Romanian primer and grammar, affirmed that Moldovan is valaho-româno, or Romanian. However, after this date, the label "Romanian language" appears only sporadically in the correspondence of the educational authorities. Gradually, Moldovan became the sole label for the language: a situation that proved useful to those who wished for a cultural separation of Bessarabia from Romania. Although referring to another historical period, Kl. Heitmann stated that the "theory of two languages — Romanian and Moldovan — was served both in Moscow as well as in Chişinău to combat the nationalistic veleities of the Republic of Moldova, being, in fact, an action against Romanian nationalism". (Heitmann, 1965). The objective of the Russian language policies in Bessarabia was the dialectization of the Romanian language. A. Arţimovici, official of the Education Department based in Odessa, wrote a letter, dated 11 February 1863, to the Minister of Public Instructions stating: "I have the opinion that it will be hard to stop the Romanian population of Bessarabia using the language of the neighbouring principalities, where the concentrated Romanian population may develop the language based on its Latin elements, not good for Slavic language. The government's directions pertaining to this case aim to make a new dialect in Bessarabia, more closely based on Slavic language, will be, as it will be seen, of no use: we cannot direct the teachers to teach a language that will soon be dead in Moldova and Wallachia... parents will not want their children to learn a different language to the one they currently speak". Although some clerks, like Arţimovici, realised that the creation of a dialect apart from the Romanian spoken in the United Principalities could never be truly effective, most of them "with the aim of fulfilling governmental policy, tendentiously called the majority language Moldovan, even in the context where Romanian had always been used previously".

Moldovan language in the Soviet Union

Autochtonization

A 1920 historical map of Romania (which includes most of today's Republic of Moldova) and the Moldavian ASSR (1924-1940), which includes most of today's Transnistria

The territory of Bessarabia which forms most of the present-day Republic of Moldova, historically the eastern part of the principality of Moldavia, was annexed from the Ottoman Empire by Imperial Russia in 1812 and remained a Russian territory until the October Revolution of 1917. In 1918, Bessarabia was united with Romania.

With the creation in 1924 of the Moldavian ASSR within the Ukrainian SSR, the Soviet authorities declared the variety spoken by the majority of Moldavians to be "Moldavian language", for the purpose of giving the region its own identity separate from Romania.

The intellectual elites of MASSR were asked to create a Moldovan literary language, distinct from Romanian. The local language, although distinct from standard Romanian, was less different from it than some dialects within Romania. Pavel Chior, the MASSR People's Commissar of Education argued that standard literary Romanian borrowed too many French-language words, making it incomprehensible to the peasants both in MASSR and in Romania and that these differences should be used to empasize the differences between the "ruling class" and of the "exploited class".

Soviet linguist M. V. Sergievsky studied the language in the MASSR and he mapped two dialects, of which one was similar to the language of Bessarabia, being chosen as the standard, to pave the way for the "liberation of the Bessarabians". Gabriel Buciuşcanu, a Socialist Revolutionary member of Sfatul Ţării who opposed the union with Romania, wrote in 1925 a grammar, but it was considered too similar to Romanian grammars and it was quickly pulled out of the circulation.

As a result of the transfers of the territory and the population movements, including deportations of locals and encouraged immigration from the rest of the USSR, by the mid-20th century, the number of Russian speakers increased. Also, during Soviet rule, Moldovan speakers were encouraged to learn the Russian language as a prerequisite for access to higher education, social status and political power. All this contributed to proliferation of Russian loanwords in spoken Moldovan.

Romanizators and autochtonists

In the 1920s there was a dispute between supporters ("Romanizators" or "Romanists") and opponents ("autochtonists", Russian: самобытники) of the convergence of the Moldavian and Romanian languages.[1]

In particular, the "autochtonists" strove to base the literary Moldovan language on local dialects from the left bank of the Dniester. Neologisms were created to cover technical areas that had no native Moldovan equivalent.

In February 1932, Moldovan communists received a directive from the Communist Party of Ukraine to switch Moldovan writing to the Latin alphabet. This was part of the massive Latinization campaign of minority languages in the USSR, based on the theory of Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr postulating the convergence to a single world language, expected to be a means of communication in the future classless society (Communism). This directive was passively sabotaged by the "autochtonist" majority, until Stanislav Kosior (General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party) and several Moldovan communists visited Stalin — who reportedly insisted on faster Latinization with the ultimate goal of the convergence of Moldavian and Romanian cultures, hinting at the possibility of a future reunion of Moldova and Romania. Nevertheless, resistance to Romanization persisted, and after 1933, a number of prominent "autochtonists" were repressed, their books destroyed, and their neologisms banned.

After the infamous February-March (1937) VKP(b) Central Committee Plenum, which escalated the Great Purge, both "romanizators" and "autochtonists" were declared "imperialist spies": "autochtonists", because they sabotaged the Latinization, and "romanizators", because they were "agents of boyar Romania" ("Боярская Румыния", i.e. anti-Soviet).

In February 1938, Moldovan communists issued a declaration transferring Moldovan writing to the Cyrillic alphabet once again, which in August 1939 was made into the law of the Moldavian ASSR and after 1940, the MSSR. The motivation was that the Latinization was used by "bourgeois-nationalist elements" to "distance the Moldavian populace from the Ukrainian and Russian ones, with the ultimate goal of the separation of Soviet Moldavia from the USSR".

Moldovan in Soviet Moldova

In June 1940 Bessarabia came under Soviet rule. A year later, in 1941, Romania invaded the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa and retook Bessarabia, along with the territory between the Dniester and Bug rivers. These territories were taken back by the Soviet Union 3 years later in 1944, and remained under Soviet administration until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In 1956, during the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinist repression, a special report was issued about the state of the Moldavian language, which stated, in part, that the discussions of 1920-30s between the two tendencies were mostly non-scientific, since there were very few linguists in the republic, and that the grammar and the basic lexicon of literary Romanian and Moldovan languages are identical, while differences are secondary and nonessential. Once again, the planned convergence of the Romanian and Moldovan languages was approved, bearing in mind the political situation in the People's Republic of Romania.

Some Soviet linguists denied the existence of a Moldovan language.

In the 1970s, a new generation of Soviet linguists debated about Moldovan being a different language. For example, one linguist, Iliasenco, compared the Romanian and Moldovan translations of a Brezhnev speech from Russian and used them as a proof for the existence of two different languages. Linguist Michael Bruchis analysed this claim, and noticed that all the words of both translations are found in both dictionaries. Also, Iliasenco implied "Moldovan" preferred synthetic while "Romanian" preferred analytic syntagms. However, this claim was also proven wrong, as a book of Nicolae Ceauşescu (the political leader of Romania at the time) uses mostly "Moldovan" synthetic syntagms, while a book by Ivan Bodyul (the secretary of the Moldavian SSR) uses mostly "Romanian" analytic syntagms. Bruchis' conclusion was that both translations were within the limits of Romanian language.

Reversion to Latin script, and beyond

In 2002, PPCD supporters rallied in Chişinău in support of a single official language. The inscription reads "Romanian people - Romanian language".

In 1989, the contemporary Romanian version of the Latin alphabet was made the official script of the Moldavian SSR.

In the Declaration of Independence of Moldova (27 August 1991), the official language was named "Romanian", but the 1994 constitution declared Moldovan the state language.

When in 1992 the Romanian Academy changed the official orthography of Romanian language, the Institute of Linguistics at the Academy of Sciences of Moldova did not make the changes, and the official orthography continued as before until 2001 when the changes introduced by the Romanian Academy were adopted by the Moldovan Academy [2].

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

In 2003, a Moldovan-Romanian dictionary (Dicţionar 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 Bărbuţă, described the dictionary as "an absurdity, serving political purposes". Stati, however, accused both of promoting "Romanian colonialism".

In the 2004 census, 16.5% (558,508) out of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova declared Romanian as their mother tongue, whereas 60% declared Moldovan. While 40% of all urban Romanian/Moldovan speakers declared Romanian as their mother tongue, in the country side hardly each 7th Romanian/Moldovan speaker indicated Romanian as his mother tongue.

References

• Grenoble, Lenore A (2003) Language Policy in the Soviet Union, Springer, ISBN 1-4020-1298-5
• M. Bărbulescu, D. Deletant, K. Hitchins, S. Papacostea, P. Teodor - Istoria României. Ed. Corint, 2004, ISBN 973-653-514-2

Further reading

• Matthew H. Ciscel (2007) The Language of the Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and Identity in an Ex-Soviet Republic", ISBN 0739114433 - About the identity of the contemporary Moldovans in the context of debates about the their language.

External links

• Moldovan
• Moldovenism
• Controversy over national identity in Moldova

External links

• Translation of Russian loans and irregularities of the spoken language in the Republic of Moldova by Eleonora Rusnac, President, Association of Professional Translators of Moldova.