User:Adriatikus/Delete MoWiki !

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Vote for the closure of Moldovan Wikipedia! Thank you!

If you are an editor of Wikipedia, vote on meta.wiki.

Why? Read below what reliable sources say, and my argumentation.


Contents

[edit] References

Linguapax Institute - a non-governmental organisation located in Barcelona that was created in 2001 to give continuity to a series of meetings organized by UNESCO:

"In order to better understand the roots and causes of the specific socio-linguistic situation in the Republic of Moldova, we need to revisit the history of the problem. The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic that was created in 1940 after annexation of Bessarabia by the Soviet Union, became a laboratory for a nationalities policy focused on Russification (Neukirch, 1996). The main aim was to deny that Moldovans and Romanians had been one people, separated because of territorial claims by the Soviet Union. A first step was to reform the Romanian script in Moldavia: the Romanian language that was written in Latin characters, after 1941 in the "Soviet part" of Moldavia was imposed to switch to the Cyrillic alphabet. A cohort of linguists worked to prove that the "Moldavian" language was independent of Romanian. One thesis said that Moldavian was an independent Eastern Roman Language (Sergievski), another one (Ceban) proclaimed that, because of intense contacts between Moldavians on the one hand and Russians and Ukrainians on the other, the formerly Roman language was being transformed into a Slavic one." [1]

Library of the US Congress Country Study # Language, Religion and Culture > Language [2]:

"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 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."

UCLA:

"Romanian is the official language of Romania and claims a total of 25 million speakers (Grimes 1992). Approximately 20 million live in Romania (90% of the population); 3 million in Moldovia (Moldovian Romanian) ..." (note also that there is no entry for Moldovan). [3]

Encyclopedia Britannica (On-line Version):

"The majority of the people of Moldova are ethnic Romanians, and the native language of Moldova is Romanian." (cf. Indiana.edu [4])

NY University School of Law - East European Constitutional Review:

"MCP [Moldovan Communist Party] mounted a sustained campaign in favor of Russian as an official language and against the identification of Moldovan and Romanian as the same language. The differences between the latter two are minimal and are mainly those of vocabulary. The theory of "Moldovenism," which argues that the languages are distinct, seeks to emphasize Moldova's separateness from Romania." [5]

James Madison University, College of Political Science - The Sovietization of Moldova:

"It was necessary for the Russian government to move Romanians out of the Moldavian Republic so that Russians could settle in their place. In order for the Moldavian Republic to be a separate state, Russia wanted all Moldova's ties with Romania to be severed. Consequently, plans to obliterate the Romanian past were immediately put into action. In Kishinev, the capital of Moldova, the Romanian Orthodox Cathedral that had been damaged in WWII was turned into the Central Exhibition Hall for Moldova."
"Additionally, the Romanian language that is spoken in Moldova was also Russified by changing the Latin alphabet to the Cyrillic alphabet. At this time, the language was renamed Moldavian. The Romanian language was removed from the schools and from the republican administration. Even up until 1989, many people who supposedly spoke Moldavian still had not mastered it. Nonetheless, the importance of Russian culture was emphasized throughout Moldova and Moldova's Romanian past was ignored. The complete negation of Romanian culture shows the fear that the Soviets had of not consolidating power in this republic due to the strength of ethnic Romanian identity felt by most of Moldova's inhabitants." [6]

Culture and the Politics of Identity in Modern Romania - an international conference on Modern Romanian intellectual and cultural history -- page at University of Pittsburgh:

"Questions about the meaning of Moldovan identity -- especially the vexed issue of the existence of a distinct Moldovan language -- have haunted policymakers for much of this century. The Moldovan case, moreover,has been seen by most scholars as a vast exercise in Stalinist "denationalization" designed to construct an "artificial" Moldovan identity and to throw the Moldovans into a state of collective amnesia about their "true" Romanian-ness. Much of the existing Western and now, post-Soviet literature on Moldova has seen the period of the MASSR (Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) -- with its heated debates over the relationship between the Moldovan and Romanian languages, its frequent alphabet changes, and its strange neologisms based on indigenous roots or Slavic calques -- as an amusing, though sinister, episode in Moldovan and Romanian history." [7]

Indiana University - Center for the Study of Global Change:

"Moldovan, virtually the same language as Romanian, is the republic’s official language and is practiced by approximately 75 percent of the population." [8]

Ethnologue.com - data for Moldova [9]:

"National or official language: Romanian (Moldovan)."
"Living languages: Romanian, Romani, Gagauz, Bulgarian" (Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International.)

Donald L. Dyer, AM'82, PhD'90, The Romanian Dialect of Moldova: A Study in Language and Politics (Edwin Mellen Press):

review: "Dyer examines the history of Soviet language policy in Moldova, where Soviet linguists attempted to create an independent literary language called "Moldavian." He focuses on the dialectal features of Moldovan Romanian and the relationship between the Romanian of Moldova and other regional languages." [10]

harvard.edu: Elizabeth Anderson, PhD Candidate in International Education, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University (New York, New York) - Disillusionment with Democracy: Notes from the Field in Moldova:

"Explaining who is a Moldovan is not a simple task. It may be assumed that Moldovans essentially are Romanians because the countries are historically linked; legend has it that a Romanian prince founded the region of Moldova in the early fourteenth century. Also, the countries share a border, similar cultural traditions, and a common language. However, Moldova, unlike Romania, has not traditionally been an independent state."
"Romanian Studies professor Charles King writes “Moldova [remains], even a decade after independence, the only country in Eastern Europe in which major disputes existed among political and cultural elites over the fundamentals of national identity.” King further argues that national Moldovan identity is not a concept that arose naturally among the region’s inhabitants but it was an artificial idea that was imposed by the Soviet Union. King explains that prior to the 1920s, scholars considered the inhabitants of Moldova to be nothing “more than an eastern offshoot of the Romanians” because their spoken dialect shared its origins with that Romanian. He explains that a distinct Moldovan identity emerged in 1924 when the Soviet Union created The Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR). [...] Soviet officials created this new nationality by declaring that Moldovans had a distinct heritage and culture from their neighbors in Romania proper."
"Building on the premise that Moldovans were distinctly different from their Romanian cousins, the Soviets took measures to separate the regions. For example, Soviet linguists created the Moldovan language by converting their current Romanian dialect (essentially Romanian with a Slavic influence) from the Latin alphabet to the Cyrillic. The Soviets did this intentionally to control the region and prevent its citizens from fraternizing with their Romanian neighbors." [11]

BBC - Languages across Europe:

"Moldovan corresponds to the Romanian language spoken in what was the Moldovan Socialist Republic."
"Moldovan was created as a definition, to make a distinction between Romanian and Moldovan during Russian occupation." [12]

[edit] My argumentation

[edit] Existence of "Moldovan language"

  • "Moldovan" isn't a language. It was (and sadly still is) a political experiment of communist origin.

[edit] Speakers

  • As it's an invented language, there aren't native speakers.
  • The people of Moldova speak a dialect of Romanian.
  • The differences between the language spoken in Moldova and Romanian are minimal.
  • I challenge anyone to provide a single example of translation between Romanian and "Moldovan", like a book, a news conference etc. (I refute, as all academics do, Vasile Stati's dictionary).
  • There are books edited in Chişinău (capital of Moldova) that can be bought in Romania. E.g. Litera Publishing House sells fairytales and school books in Romania (these are for children!). (argument on "Moldovan-Romanian translation")
  • The Romanian TV station ProTV is broadcasting in Moldova. (argument on "Romanian-Moldovan translation")

[edit] Cyrillic alphabet

  • Althought it was imposed by the Soviets and abolished about 15 years ago, I'm not ab initio against. But before starting a "Cyrillic Romanian" project we should see how many users prefer it. And the voters should firstly prove they can speak the language as currently only one user (meta, en) edits MoWiki using on-line translators (since he can't speak the language at all) (solution: live on IRC, tested by an admin). Otherwise they are free to use/edit WP in their mother tongues.

[edit] Official use

  • The Moldovan Academy's Institute for Linguistics uses the term "Romanian language" [13]. May I ask who is studying and regulating the official language of Moldova ? On what basis could someone correct the misspellings in MoWiki ?
  • The only official body stating the existence of this language is the Moldovan Parliament, ruled by the communists (this is not the place to discuss why they made this choice).
  • The discussions between Moldovan and Romanian officials are never translated.

[edit] Finally

  • Since this "language" is a proven political manipulation and not a scientific fact, maintaining MoWiki would imply making WP to comply with political arbitrary decisions.

This is not a political decision we are facing. This is a decision on two choices: a political one (maintaining MoWiki) and a scientific one (deleting MoWiki).

Vote FOR on meta.wiki !

-- Thank you --


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