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| MOLDOVAN-A LANGUAGE THAT DOESN’T EXIST(21.11.2007) |
| (2007-11-22) |
| Last updated: 2007-11-22 16:11 EET |
The so-called Moldovan language was included last month among the official languages in which two agreements between the European Union and the Republic of Moldova were drafted. This gave rise to a lot of outrage not only among the scientific community but also on the political scene. Romania’s Foreign Minister Adrian Cioroianu said Romania did not recognise the Moldovan language and had no intention of doing so. He warned that Bucharest would not sign any documents concluded between the European Union and the Republic of Moldova if they implied the existence of a Moldovan language.
Later, the European Commissioner for Multilingualism, the Romanian Leonard Orban, announced that all references to the Moldovan language on the European Commission’s web site had been modified. This linguistic and political dispute can be traced back to 1924, when the Soviet authorities set up an autonomous Moldovan-Transniestran republic with a majority Russian speaking population . They introduced the theory of a Moldovan language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet and is different from the Romanian language. By this theory, the former USSR tried to justify its claims on the Romanian province of Bessarabia which it forcefully annexed in 1940 and later, after World War II, changed into the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova, today’s Republic of Moldova.
Despite Stalin’s policy to legitimize the idea that the Moldovan language was different from Romanian and the Moldovan nation was different from the Romanian nation, the Romanian spirit survived in Moldova in the years of Soviet occupation. After it gained its independence in 1991, restoring the scientific truth was a natural process supported by the Academy in Kishinew and the school curriculum in which the Romanian Language and the History of Romanians have become subject matters studied in all forms. The situation is not agreed by the communists in Moldova led by President Vladimir Voronin and by Moscow.
They fear that the awareness of a common language and history might lead to the reunion of Romania with Moldova on historical and ethnic grounds. The communist government in Kishinew has legislated the notion of a Moldovan language and claims that Romania’s refusal to accept it is an attack to Moldova’s sovereignty. Geo-strategically speaking, a harmonious relationship between Moldova and Romania is not to Russia’s liking, which seeks to consolidate its political and military presence at the eastern border of the European Union.
Beyond these fears and ambitions lies, however, the scientific truth, promoted by the Academies in Bucharest and Kishinew. On behalf of this indisputable truth, the scholar Eugeniu Coseriu used to say in 1997 that promoting the idea of a Moldovan language different from Romanian is a mistake or a fraud from a linguistic point of view, an utopia from a historical point of view and ethnic and cultural genocide from a political point of view.
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