Now that the authorities in Chisinau have convinced the Moldovan parliament to legislate that the official language of the country is “Romanian”, the old tectonics of Moldovan nationalism and Romanian nationalism have ended with Unionists, Europeans, Russophiles and Moldovans.

Alexandru Kogal is a researcher at the Institute of Romanian Philology “A. Philippide” – Iassi, Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics, Università di Pavia, Departimento di Studi Umanistici

I will not comment on them here as my contribution will be minimal. I’m just saying that as a linguist I cannot help but be satisfied when I see that the legislator makes the right decision: the variety of the Romanian language in the Republic of Moldova is the Romanian language, not the Moldovan language. I believe that this is the dream of every researcher: to see the results of his work confirmed by the political elite. I just know that’s not true at all. In fact, the decision to call the language of the republic by the term “Romanian” is political and is not at all interested in the theories of linguists, just as the term “Moldovan” did not appear before this, because politicians in the east of Prut locked the Grammar of the Academy in the basements, and also for political reasons. As then, the Prut discussion misses the meeting with a big topic: if we agreed, because it is so, that the language in the Republic is called “Romanian”, then what a Romanian it is said there and what do we associate it with?? (To the Romanian Cantemir? to the Romanian Ceausescu? to Iliescu? to Čolak?) And the second question that we leave behind: and now what? Let’s start with the first question.

From now on, Romanian will be spoken in the Republic, but not the one you are thinking of. The Romanian language variety from the Republic of Moldova was defined by the Bukovina linguist (dialectologist) Turkulec in 1993 as a regional variety of the Romanian language, placing it alongside the mountain, Moldavian and Transylvanian varieties. In the Republic, when citizens do not speak Russian among themselves, they speak o Bessarabian regional Romanian, which is different from Moldovan regional Romanian (so I speak Iasi or Tekuchi). Obviously, this variety is also, as I said, also Romanian. But, from a sociolinguistic point of view, it is not the Romanian language, period, because such a thing exists only as a cultural and scientific reference point (“historical language” or “exemplary language”, according to the Moldavian philosopher and linguist Cozeriu).

This is about “difference”, and the difference is not so much in Moscow as in Bucharest and Iasi, the political and cultural entities that constantly operate to patronize Eastern Moldovans, telling them what to do, how to submit to the Romanians, how to renounce their identity , which says that it does not exist. And now, more than ever, this Romanian ethno-nationalism has come to the fore again, flying among the imaginations of Dambovitsa politics, bubbling through online social media platforms, clouding people with common sense and books. National centralism in Romania, but also in the Republic, uses a different point: for us, you are deceiving us, that we have deprived Moldovans of their identity (they call themselves Moldovans, but speak Romanian), and for them, they culturally confirm their Romanian belonging, so , kinship with the democratic Western world. When we put aside this sulphurous vapor and return to the real problems of the language, we will see that the huge error in the question of Moldavian linguistic identity, whether west of the Prut or west, belongs to Romania, not to Russia (we know, it massively Russified Eastern Moldova). This is about Romanian national-centralism, that is, about our policy, which for a century and a half fought and almost won in the destruction of the identity of everyone who dared to add something to the concept of “Romanian”. It is not good to be Romanian and Jewish, it is not good to be Romanian and Moldovan, it is not good to be Romanian and Buddhist, etc. But we can be Tekuchians and Romanians, or, best of all, only Romanians, this does not threaten the nation.

The Romanian language you are thinking of is not spoken in Romania either. Very few opposed the national-centralist movement. Victor Yancu from Maramure explains in the magazine “Limba Română” (Institute of Linguistics in Bucharest) the concept regional languagediscussed with us since the 1970s, in the Italian network (Italian regional). But the mainstream, centralist current did not fuel the debate, the question remained in position in the late 1990s, when Professor Bochman reignited the debate, this time adding a field study in the urban environments of Iași, Chişinău and Bălţi, collecting a multitude of data together with Romanian and Moldovan colleagues , on the basis of which he confirmed the existence of regional varieties of Romanian, corresponding to historical regions, variety Bessarabian (or MOLDOVA from the Republic of Moldova), which differs from Moldovan from Romania. Read the entire article and comment on contributors.ro