Moldova Languages

The official language of Moldova is Romanian, which is also referred to Moldovan by most of Moldova's natives. It is a Romance language, belonging to the Italic Branch of Indo-European languages. Romanian is part of the Balkan-Romance group that evolved from the Vulgar Latin between the 5th and 8th century. The Romanian alphabet consists of 22 consonants and 7 vowels. K, Q, W, and Y are not part of the native Romanian alphabet. They were introduced to cater for the spellings of borrowed words. The writings of Romanian are based on the Latin Script. Unlike in other Romance languages such as French and Italian, /h/ is not silent in the pronunciation of Romanian words.

Romanian is the most popular language in Moldova. In fact, approximately 80.2% of the Moldovans speak Romanian language. Around 6% of Moldovans speak Romanian as their second language. It is also spoken as a secondary language by most of the minority groups such as the native Russians and Ukrainians who reside in Moldova. In the 2004 census, over 2.5 million people or 75.8% of the total population declared Moldovan or Romanian as their first language, which they use in their daily communications. A small percentage of the minority communities, amounting to approximately 7% of the minority, also declared to have an understanding of Romanian.

As earlier stated, Romanian is the official language of the country. However, most citizens of Moldova would rather refer to the language as Moldovan than Romanian. The Romanian used in Moldova is similar to the Romanian spoken in other countries that use Romanian as their official language. There might be very few variations in terms of borrowing and accent.

Apart from Romanian, there are other minority languages that are spoken by mostly the minority communities in Moldova. These languages are mainly spoken by immigrants and by a few people who once lived in Moldova, and remained behind after Moldova’s independence. Russian is the most common minority language, probably due to the post-soviet union status of Moldova. Other common minority languages used in Moldovan are Ukrainian, ethnic Gaugaz and Bulgarian.