Moldova celebrates Romanian Language Day today

Moldova is celebrating Romanian Language Day today, a rather unique holiday to honor the return to the use of Latin script twenty years ago.

During the Soviet Union, Romanian was written in cyrillic and was called Moldovan.

The controversy over the name of the language continues today. The Constitution says that Moldovans speak "Moldovan written in Latin script" despite the fact that every schoolchild in the country officially learns Romanian.

In addition, many continue to use the term "Moldovan." The Party of Communists has been a big proponent of this approach, emphasizing that a country can pick the name of its language despite the fact that some of its leaders have acknowledged the language's virtual similarity with Romanian.

The four leaders of the ruling Alliance for European Integration seem somewhat divided over this issue. The heads of the three liberal parties - the Liberal Democrats, the Liberals, and Moldova Noastra - called the language "Romanian" today, while Democratic Party head Marian Lupu, who recently defected from the Communists, did not want to specify what he calls the language.

Whatever the term is, however, Alliance members and other civil society activists and intellectuals have complained that the language of the majority population in Moldova is often underused and that Russian still dominates a large part of the public sphere.

h/t www.stireazilei.md