After the Revolution

Let me take you on a bit of a side trip to the Republic of Moldova.

From 2004-2006, I taught English in the town of Calarasi, just an hour outside the capital, Chisinau.

There were three secondary schools in my town: two for Romanian speakers and one for Russian speakers. I taught at a Romanian school.

Many of my students told me that Russian was their most difficult class. Some of them hated it. Other students spoke Russian with their friends in the hallways.

I worked with a gym teacher from the Russian lyceum to run an afterschool basketball program. She and I communicated in Romanian, but sometimes she struggled to remember words.

I spoke in English with my students in class. Sometimes when they saw me speaking with Moldovans outside of class, they’d say incredulously, “You speak Romanian?”

Other times, in the same situation, they would say, “Miss Kate, you speak Moldovan!”

Now Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin has proposed that the European Union recognize Moldovan as an official language distinct from the one spoken in neighboring Romania.

The article describes a scene in which the foreign minister of Romania addresses Voronin in French, saying that it is more advantageous for the two countries to share a common language.

Voronin answers in Russian that the decision belongs to the Moldovan people. He even suggests that Moldovan might have predated Romanian, saying, “We’re still having never-ending debates with Romania about which came first, the chicken or the egg.”

I know something the author of this article does not mention. Whatever you call it, Romanian or Moldovan, Voronin can’t speak it to save his life.

Voronin is a pro-Russia, Russian-speaking leader of the Communist party. Whenever he conducted a televised interview in Romanian, my students would come in to class the next day mocking his many mistakes. Magazines published articles making fun of the way he spoke.

Why is he the champion of the Moldovan tongue?

You won’t find the answer in the article.

In the past, Moldovans have been part of both Romania and the Soviet Union. Many Moldovans have lobbied to rejoin Romania. Others still think fondly of their days back in the U.S.S.R.

What better way for Russia enthusiasts to drive a wedge between Moldova and Romania than to claim that the two do not actually speak the same language?

The first time I traveled to Romania, I went to Bucharest by mini-bus on my own. Almost all of my fellow passengers were Moldovans. I was unsure how I would fare in another country by myself.

But hearing my first Romanian accent was like coming out into the sunlight. I didn’t miss a word. It was the same language I had learned, just more enunciated and thereby easier to understand.

Sure, there are slight differences. Some Russian vocabulary has made its way into the Romanian Moldovans speak. The accent is distinct. But calling the languages the two countries speak separate is like distinguishing “Ohioan” from what they speak in North Carolina.

Fine, when I did my undergraduate studies there, I had a different accent from some of my friends, and I didn’t know that you could call a ski cap a “toboggan,” but we were all speaking English. And Ohio is much farther from North Carolina than Moldova is from Romania.

As can be heard in my interview with Ukrainian immigrant Michael Arov, language is not just a topic of discussion in Moldova. Language is a key element in the identity of the Eastern European.

The common thread is the influence of Russian. As the former members of the Soviet Union have broken away, they have not lost Russian, the language that was in some cases forced upon them. Those who have grown up speaking Russian now feel national languages like Romanian or Ukrainian are the ones being forced.

Many Russians who have emigrated to these countries have not found it necessary to learn the native tongue. Members of neighboring communities sometimes find themselves unable to communicate.

As the European Union inches farther East, these issues stop being local.