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MoldovaLANGUAGE, RELIGION, AND CULTURE
Language
The Moldovan dialect of Romanian, spoken by the
majority of
the people of Bessarabia, was viewed by both the Russian
Empire
and the Soviet Union as an impediment to controlling the
local
populace. Under the tsars, Romanian-language education and
the
Romanian press were forbidden as part of a process of
forced
Russification.
Stalin justified the creation of the Moldavian SSR by
claiming that a distinct "Moldavian" language was an
indicator
that "Moldavians" were a separate nationality from the
Romanians
in Romania. In order to give greater credence to this
claim, in
1940 Stalin imposed the Cyrillic alphabet on "Moldavian"
to make
it look more like Russian and less like Romanian; archaic
Romanian words of Slavic origin were imposed on
"Moldavian";
Russian loanwords and phrases were added to "Moldavian";
and a
new theory was advanced that "Moldavian" was at least
partially
Slavic in origin. (Romanian is a Romance language
descended from
Latin.) In 1949 Moldavian citizens were publicly
reprimanded in a
journal for daring to express themselves in literary
Romanian.
The Soviet government continued this type of behavior for
decades.
Proper names in Moldova were subjected to
Russianization (see Glossary)
as well. Russian endings were added to purely
Romanian
names, and individuals were referred to in the Russian
manner by
using a patronymic (based on one's father's first name) as
a
middle name.
In 1989 members of most of the Moldavian SSR's
nationalities
claimed their national language as their mother tongue:
Romanians
(95 percent), Ukrainians (62 percent), Russians (99
percent),
Gagauz (91 percent), Bulgarians (79 percent), and Roma (82
percent). The exceptions were Jews (26 percent citing
Yiddish),
Belarusians (43 percent), Germans (31 percent), and Poles
(10
percent).
Although both Romanian written in the Cyrillic alphabet
(that
is, "Moldavian") and Russian were the official languages
of the
Moldavian SSR, only 62 percent of the total population
claimed
Romanian as their native language in 1979. If ethnic
Romanians
are subtracted from this number, the figure falls to just
over 1
percent. Only 4 percent of the entire population claimed
Romanian
as a second language.
In 1979 Russian was claimed as a native language by a
large
proportion of Jews (66 percent) and ethnic Belarusians (62
percent) and by a significant proportion of ethnic
Ukrainians (30
percent). Proportions of other nationalities naming
Russian as a
native language ranged from 17 percent of ethnic
Bulgarians to 3
percent of ethnic Romanians (urban Romanians were more
Russianized than rural Romanians). Russian was claimed as
a
second language by a sizable proportion of all the
nationalities:
Romanians (46 percent), Ukrainians (43 percent), Gagauz
(68
percent), Jews (30 percent), Bulgarians (67 percent),
Belarusians
(34 percent), Germans (53 percent), Roma (36 percent), and
Poles
(24 percent).
On August 31, 1989, the Supreme Soviet of Moldavia
passed the
Law on State Language, which made Moldovan written in the
Latin
alphabet the state language of the Moldavian SSR. Because
of
pressure exerted by non-Romanian ethnic groups, Russian
was
retained as the language of interethnic communication. In
areas
where non-Romanian ethnic groups were the majority, the
language
of that majority could also be used as a means of
communication.
Because of strong objections raised by the non-Romanian
nationalities, implementation of the law was delayed.
The new Moldovan constitution, adopted August 27, 1994,
states that Moldovan, written in the Latin script, is
designated
as the official language, but provisions were made for
Russian
and other languages to be used in areas of minority
concentrations. Russian was also to be the language of
interethnic communication.
On April 27, 1995, President Snegur asked Parliament to
change the name of the language in the constitution, from
Moldovan to Romanian, in response to demonstrations and
strikes
led by students. According to Moldovan law, it would be
six
months before a proposed change to the constitution could
be
made.
Data as of June 1995
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