A new win for the Romanian language in Chişinău
The Constitutional Court in Chişinău rules to maintain phrase “Romanian language” in the legislation of the Republic of Moldova.
Roxana Vasile, 12.03.2024, 13:50
A record number of almost 13,000 people have applied for the 5,000 places in national course programme to study the Romanian language in 2024 in the Republic of Moldova. The courses are available to adults in this country who wish to perfect their knowledge of Romanian or learn it from scratch. According to a statement from the Moldovan education ministry, most applications came from the capital Chişinău, the autonomous region of Gagauzia in the south-west of Moldova, the city of Bălţi and from Tiraspol, the capital of the break-away Russian-speaking region of Transnistria. As to the background of the applicants, they work in the areas of education, economy, medicine, the central and local public administration, the arts and culture and in the legal profession. Romanian language courses are free of charge and are held between March and December, with participants being awarded a language certificate at the end indicating their proficiency level.
This comes in the wider context of Monday’s ruling by the Constitutional Court in Chișinău that the phrase “Romanian language” is maintained in all the legislation of the Republic of Moldova, including in the Constitution. The Court thus rejected a move submitted last year by a group of socialist and communist MPs following Parliament’s implementation of a Court ruling from 2013 on the name of the country’s official language. The president of the Constitutional Court in Chișinău, Domnica Manole, explains:
“Given that the rulings of the Constitutional Court cannot be contested, that they are final, and that, irrespective of their nature, generate the effects established by the Court, the Court thus ruled as inadmissible the request referring to changing the name of the state language, which is the Romanian language, in the legislation passed by Parliament.”
The pro-Russian authorities who governed Moldova in the past repeatedly tried to avoid using the correct name of the language spoken by their citizens, using instead phrases like the “Moldovan language”, “official language”, “mother tongue”, or simply “our language”, anything, that is, but “Romanian language”.
Ten years after the Constitutional Court established that the Romanian language is the official language in Moldova, the country’s Parliament in March 2023 passed a law to change the name of the state language from “Moldovan” to “Romanian”, thus inscribing in law that the language spoken in the republic is Romanian. The country’s president Maia Sandu welcomed the move at the time, saying that “the law recognises a historical and undeniable truth: the state language of the Republic of Moldova is Romanian”, while those who for decades promoted the idea of a Moldovan language only sought to divide society. (CM)
