Ziua Limbii

Exactly one year ago, I decided to celebrate Moldova's Language Day by speaking only Moldovan (or Romanian, depending on what you want to call it). When volunteers called me or sent me text messages, I answered only in Moldovan. This was problematic when the two Russian speakers from our group tried to contact me, but I was convinced that it was their fault for not learning the official state language, enshrined in law on August 31, 1989.

This morning, the first word I said was "Привет". This was intentional. My opinion about Moldova's language issue has changed a lot in the past year, mostly because of my experiences and discussions, but also because I now better understand the politics of language in Moldova.

With the exception of the inter-war period of 1918-1940, Bessarabia (basically current Moldova without Transnistria) had been controlled by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union since 1812. By the time 1989 came, Russians had been a major ethnic and political influence in Bessarabia for 177 years.

Russians were also not the only non-Moldovan ethnicity in Bessarabia in the 19th century. According to Charles King in his illuminating book, The Moldovans, Bessarabia in 1897 was only 47.6 percent Moldovan, while Ukrainians, Jews, Russians, Bulgarians, Germans, Turks, Poles, Armenians, Turks and others comprised a plurality of the population. Moldovan was not the predominant language in cities, and the majority of newspapers were published in Russian because that's the language that readers wanted.

In 1918, Moldova's Sfatul Tarii hastily voted to unite with the rest of Romania. Minorities in this new combined nation were not well treated, especially the Jews who were slaughtered in the Holocaust. This was also the first time that Moldovans began to read and write their language in the Latin alphabet, echoing Romania's 19th-century change from the Cyrillic alphabet. Meanwhile in Transnistria, which had become a large part of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet language reformers were trying to create Moldovan grammar texts and words that would differentiate the dialects of Romanian and Moldovan into two separate languages.

In 1941, the newly formed Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, which encompassed the territory now known as the Republic of Moldova, was 68.8 percent Moldovan, 11.1 percent Ukrainian, 7.5 percent Bulgarian, 6.7 percent Russian and 4.9 percent Gagauz. Thus over 30 percent of the population would not necessarily be expected to speak the Moldovan language. Because nearly a third of the population new Russian better than Moldovan and because the MSSR was only one republic that needed to communicate with other Soviet states, Russian was declared the state language.

When discussing politics, this is the point where Romanian language nationalists tend to become upset. When you went to the store in the MSSR, you spoke in Russian. When you filed paperwork, it was in Russian. When you went to university, you studied in Russian. Two academics who studied French at Moldova's largest university have told me about times when they made an entire presentation in French and then were told to repeat it in Russian. Moldovan was not the esteemed language, and Russian speakers were often unwilling to stoop to what they called "the peasant language".

The most important thing about this time is that while ethnic Moldovans clung nearly unflinchingly to their language, other ethnicities began to use Russian. In 1989, 36.7 percent of ethnic Ukrainians in the MSSR spoke Russian as their native language, as opposed to 61.6 percent who kept Ukrainian, according to a Soviet census cited by King. Of those who continued to speak Ukrainian, 43.0 percent of them spoke fluent Russian, as opposed to only 12.8 percent who spoke fluent Moldovan.

Of ethnic Gagauz, who lived mostly in the south, 7.4 percent spoke Russian as their native language and 72.8 percent spoke it fluently; only 4.4 percent spoke fluent Moldovan. Over two-thirds of Jews in the MSSR spoke Russian as their first language.

Russian became not only the language of power, government work and commerce. It also became the language of Moldova's many ethnic minorities. These minorities were not accounted for by politicians in 1989.

After nearly a year of public debate, the MSSR Supreme Soviet on August 31, 1989 declared Moldovan as the official state language. This was mainly the work of nationalists and academics, and they immediately began talk of leaving the weakened USSR and re-uniting with Romania after nearly 50 years apart.

This talk was not only hasty, but it caused the ethnic minorities, nearly one-third of the MSSR's population, to worry. They were suddenly told that they spoke the wrong language, and many of them did not expect good treatment as minorities if unification with Romania were to happen. This led to the secession of Gagauzia and Transnistria.

In my opinion, ethnic Moldovans took the politics of language too far in the early '90s when they declared the national anthem to be "Limba Noastra," meaning "Our Language". This sent a message to Russian speakers that they were no longer included in the "we" of the Moldovan people?

Although the politics of language no longer creates large-scale demonstrations like in the late '80s and early '90s, there is still tension between Moldovan-speakers and Russian-speakers. On this blog I often write about times when I am frustrated with someone who only speaks Russian, and I've only lived here for a year. Because it is Language Day in Moldova, I want to list some observations about and suggestions for easing the language problem in this country.

• It is very easy for foreigners coming to Moldova to look at language in this country as a straightforward timeline: Russian was the dominant language in the Soviet era, both Russian and Moldovan are prevalent now, and some time in the future the entire country will speak Moldovan. But a significant minority in Moldova never considered Moldovan to be their language and entire ethnic groups, namely Ukrainians and Gagauz, have embraced Russian and see no need to learn Moldovan. This simplistic view is unrealistic.


• Moldova is a linguistically diverse country in which citizens need to know both Moldovan and Russian in order to get by. Native Russian speakers do not need to master Moldovan, nor do Moldovans need to master Russian. Moldovans don't need to have perfect Russian grammar, and Russians don't need to be able to describe their feelings or talk about abstract concepts in Moldovan. But every citizen should know how to buy food, get and give directions and otherwise be able to navigate life on a basic level in both languages. Moldovan-speaking restaurant workers who don't know the menu items in Russian are ignorant and ill-equipped for their job, just the same as a Russian-speaking shopkeeper who has to show a Moldovan-speaking customer the number 42 on a calculator because she doesn't know enough Moldovan to say how much his beer and water cost.


• Having the Moldovan national anthem only in the Moldovan language is offensive to Russian-speaking minorities. It should be recognized as a knee-jerk post-Soviet reaction against Russian language imperialism and retired as the national anthem. Moldova should look to the example of Canada, whose national anthem can be sung in either English or French.


• The Russian language should be recognized in some way in the Moldovan constitution. How, I don't know. But the fact that so many people speak it as their first language and the language isn't recognized in the constitution makes little sense.


• Currently, all signs in Moldova must be written in Moldovan. After they are written in Moldovan, writing the same message in Russian is optional. Looking again at Canada and Quebec, Moldova should make Russian signs mandatory in some situations, perhaps in raions and cities where at least 30 percent of the population prefers Russian over Moldovan.


• Settling some of these minority issues will help Moldova feel more cohesive and will remove a major objection that Transnistrian separatists currently have with the Chisinau government.

I don't have all the answers on this subject, but neither does anyone else. Language in the territory of modern Moldova has always been a major question and it has made it difficult to form a single national identity. August 31, 1989 was an important day for Moldova because it was one of the first times when the Supreme Soviet acted as a legislative body instead of simply rubber-stamping whatever Moscow said, according to King. It was also important because it gave the Moldovan majority a cultural win that it had been waiting for for decades. The cultural pendulum had been so far to the Russian side, but over the course of several months it swung to the Moldovan side. But it is important for Moldova to ask itself, "Did we go too far?" Moderate Moldovans need to examine the language question and push the pendulum back toward the center.