The archive
Moldovan
Romanian with a passport
Linguistically it is Romanian. The separate name is a political object, and an interesting one.
FamilyProto-Indo-European › Italic › Latin › Romance › Eastern Romance › Romanian
ScriptLatin, Cyrillic until 1989
Speakers2M
Weeks to a working level24 Rated as Romanian, because that is what it is. Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.
- Linguists on both banks of the Prut agree it is Romanian. The disagreement has never been a linguistic one.
- It was written in Cyrillic under Soviet rule, which made the same language look foreign to its own speakers.
- In 2003 a Moldovan-Romanian dictionary of 19,000 words was published. Linguists asked the author to stop.
- Moldova changed the name of its state language back to Romanian in law in 2023.
- It is the clearest case on this whole page of the old line that a language is a dialect with an army.
Next to its neighbours
Where Moldovan parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.
Moldovan vs Romanian → Moldovan vs Italian → Moldovan vs Spanish →
Where to practise it
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Moldovan with.
The Moldovan Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Stories in Moldovan
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.