Moldovan or Moldavian (, ) is one of the two local names for the Romanian language in Moldova. Moldovan was declared the official language of Moldova in Article 13 of the constitution adopted in 1994, while the 1991 Declaration of Independence of Moldova used the name Romanian. In 2003, the Moldovan parliament adopted a law defining Moldovan and Romanian as glottonyms for the same language. In 2013, the Constitutional Court of Moldova interpreted that Article 13 of the constitution is superseded by the Declaration of Independence, thus giving official status to the name Romanian. On 16 March 2023, the Moldovan Parliament approved a law on referring to the national language as Romanian in all legislative texts and the constitution. On 22 March, the president of Moldova, Maia Sandu, promulgated the law.
The breakaway region of Transnistria continues to recognize "Moldovan" as one of its official languages, alongside Russian and Ukrainian. Ukraine also recognized "Moldovan" as a minority language in the country until 13 June 2026, when came into effect the promulgation of a bill approved by the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, on 3 December 2025 excluding Moldovan from its list of languages protected in accordance with the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. All then 16 schools in Ukraine's Odesa Oblast that taught "Moldovan" had already dropped the term and replaced it with Romanian, as Ukrainian newspaper Dumska reported on 13 January 2024 citing an announcement from the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine.
The language of the Moldovans had for centuries been interchangeably identified by both terms, but during the time of the Soviet Union, Moldovan, or as it was called in English at the time, Moldavian, was the only term officially recognized. Its resolution declared Moldavian a Romance language distinct from Romanian.
While a majority of Moldovans with higher education, as well as a majority of inhabitants of the capital city of Chișinău, call their language Romanian, most rural residents indicated Moldovan as their native language in the 2004 census. In schools in Moldova, the term "Romanian language" has been used since independence.
The variety of Romanian spoken in Moldova is the Moldavian dialect, which is spread approximately within the territory of the former Principality of Moldavia (now split between Romania, Moldova and Ukraine). Moldavian is considered one of the five major spoken varieties of Romanian. However, all five are written identically, and Moldova and Romania share the same literary language.*
Encyclopædia Britannia (online ed.), quoted in
L. I. Lukht, B. P. Narumov. "" [Romanian language]. [Languages of the world]. [Romance languages]. М., Academia, Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2001.
The standard alphabet used in Moldova is equivalent to the Romanian alphabet, which uses the Latin script. Until 1918, varieties of the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet were used. The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet (derived from the Russian alphabet and standardised in the Soviet Union) was used in 1924–1932 and 1938–1989 and remains in use in Transnistria.Denis Deletant, Slavonic Letters in Moldova, Wallachia & Transylvania from the Tenth to the Seventeenth Centuries, Ed. Enciclopedicӑ, Bucharest, 1991.
History and politics Birth of the concept
The history of the Moldovan language refers to the historical evolution of the glottonym Moldavian/Moldovan in Moldova and beyond. It is closely tied to the region's political status, as during long periods of rule by Russia and the Soviet Union, officials emphasized the language's name as part of separating the Moldovans from those people who began to identify as Romanian in a different nation-building process. Cyrillic script was in use. From a linguistic perspective, Moldovan is an alternative name for the varieties of the Romanian language spoken in the Republic of Moldova (see History of the Romanian language).
Before 1918, during the period between the wars, and after the union of Bessarabia with Romania, scholars did not have consensus that Moldovans and the Romanians formed a single ethnic group. The Moldovan peasants had grown up in a different political entity and missed the years of creating a pan-Romanian national political consciousness. They identified as Moldovans speaking the language "Moldovan". This caused reactions from pan-Romanian nationalists. The concept of the distinction of Moldovan from Romanian was explicitly stated only in the early 20th century. It accompanied the raising of national awareness among Moldovans, with the Soviets emphasizing distinctions between Moldavians and Romanians. Moldavian has also been recorded by the 1960s' Romanian Linguistic Atlas as the answer to the question "What [language] do you speak?" in parts of Western Moldavia (Galați and Iași counties).
Major developments since the fall of the Soviet Union include resuming use of a Latin script rather than Cyrillic letters in 1989, and several changes in the statutory name of the official language used in Moldova. At one point of particular confusion about identity in the 1990s, all references to geography in the name of the language were dropped, and it was officially known simply as — 'the state language'.
Moldovan was assigned the code mo in ISO 639-1 and code mol in ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3.SIL International: ISO 639 code sets: Documentation for ISO 639 identifier: mol Since November 2008, these have been deprecated, leaving ro and ron (639-2/T) and rum (639-2/B), the language identifiers to be used for the variant of the Romanian language also known as Moldavian and Moldovan in English, the ISO 639-2 Registration Authority said in explaining the decision.
In 1989, the contemporary Romanian version of the Latin alphabet was adopted as the official script of the Moldavian SSR. Legea cu privire la funcționarea limbilor vorbite pe teritoriul RSS Moldovenești nr. 3465-XI din 01.09.89 Vestile nr. 9/217, 1989 (Law regarding the usage of languages spoken on the territory of the Republic of Moldova): "Moldavian SSR supports the desire of the Moldovans that live across the borders of the Republic, and considering the really existing linguistical Moldo-Romanian identity – of the Romanians that live on the territory of the USSR, of doing their studies and satisfying their cultural needs in their mother tongue."
Independent Moldova
The Declaration of Independence of Moldova (27 August 1991) named the official language as "Romanian". The 1994 constitution, passed under a Communist government, declared "Moldovan" as the state language.
When in 1993 the Romanian Academy changed the official orthography of the Romanian language, the Institute of Linguistics at the Academy of Sciences of Moldova did not initially make these changes, which however have since been adopted.
In 1996, the Moldovan president Mircea Snegur attempted to change the official name of the language back to Romanian; the Moldovan Parliament, dominated by the Democratic Agrarian Party and various far left forces, dismissed the proposal as promoting "Romanian expansionism".
In 2003, the Moldovan–Romanian dictionary () by Vasile Stati was published aiming to prove that there existed two distinct languages. Reacting to this, linguists of the Romanian Academy in Romania declared that all the Moldovan words are also Romanian words, although some of its contents are disputed as being Russian loanwords. In Moldova, the head of the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Linguistics, Ion Bărbuță, described the dictionary as "an absurdity, serving political purposes". Stati, however, accused both of promoting "Romanian colonialism". At that point, a group of Romanian linguists adopted a resolution stating that promotion of the notion of a distinct Moldovan language is an anti-scientific campaign.
In 2003, the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova adopted a law defining Moldovan and Romanian as designations for the same language (glottonyms).
In the 2004 census, 16.5% (558,508) of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova declared Romanian as their native language, whereas 60% declared Moldovan. Most of the latter responses were from rural populations. While the majority of the population in the capital city of Chișinău gave their language as "Romanian", in the countryside more than six-sevenths of the Romanian/Moldovan speakers indicated "Moldovan" as their native language, reflecting historic conservatism. Currently, 2,184,065 people or 80.2% of those covered by the 2014 census on the right bank of the Dniester or Moldova (proper, without the Transnistrian separatist region) identified Moldovan or Romanian as their native language, of which 1,544,726 (55.1%) declared Moldovan and 639,339 (22.8%) declared it Romanian."Rezultatele Recensământului Populației și al Locuințelor 2014", at https://statistica.gov.md/ro/recensamantul-populatiei-si-al-locuintelor-2014-122.html Of the total population that declared its mother tongue in the 2024 Moldovan census, 49.2% declared Moldovan and 31.3% declared Romanian. The share of the population that declared Romanian as its mother tongue increased by 8.1% compared to the 2014 census (23.2%), and the share that declared Moldovan decreased by 7.8% (56.9% in the 2014 census).Rezultatele finale ale Recensământului Populației și Locuințelor 2024, at https://statistica.gov.md/ro/statistic_indicator_details/60#excel_tables_pages , table 5.11, Populația după limba maternă, pe grupe de vârstă, la recensământul din 2024.
According to the 2014 census, 2,720,377 answered to the question on "language usually used for communication". 2,138,964 people or 78.63% of the inhabitants of Moldova (proper, without the Transnistrian separatist region) have Moldovan/Romanian as first language, of which 1,486,570 (53%) declared it Moldovan and 652,394 (23.3%) declared it Romanian. In the 2024 Moldovan census, regarding the usually spoken language (; distinct from the mother tongue), 46.0% declared it to be "Moldovan" and 33.2% declared it to be Romanian, with both adding up to 79.2%. The two had together an increase of 0.5% compared to the 2014 census, and there was a significant increase in the share of self-declared speakers of Romanian as their usually spoken language, of 9.5%, as well as a decrease in the share of the self-declared speakers of "Moldovan" as their usually spoken language, of 9%, compared to the 2014 census.Rezultatele finale ale Recensământului Populației și Locuințelor 2024, at https://statistica.gov.md/ro/statistic_indicator_details/60#excel_tables_pages , table 5.18, Populația în vârstă de 3 ani și peste după limba vorbită de obicei, pe grupe de vârstă, la recensământul din 2024.