Identity Crisis: Moldovan Identity And Macedonian Identity

Abstract

Claiming a language means reclaiming its identity roots: it is hard to identify in a culture in which one does not possess the language in which it is expressed. That is why, this article concentrates on the cultural and linguistic security of a certain community that may be compromised due to competition with another language, in which case the will to protect the language and culture takes root in the public consciousness (it is the case of the competition between Romanian and Russian on the Moldovan territory). Having to resort to alternating the linguistic codes, Romanians over the Prut, as those in the south of the Danube (Macedonians) have kept generation after generation, their "home" identity consciousness. In the traditional society the identity of a person is predestined and is based on some criteria: place of birth, family, social class, religion, etc. and usually remains unchanged throughout life. The concept of identity and belonging in the globalization era was enriched by new meanings. Social mobility leads to the dissolution of the traditional model based on the hereditary principle. The search for identity is a recent phenomenon. Today, cultural identity cannot be conceived as being inherited from the family but acquired since the early years, in the process of socialization and literacy. Identity is the encounter between subject and culture. But culture cannot exist without language. Language is the essence of culture and its vector.

Keywords: Languageidentityculturecodesociety

Introduction

Defending your mother tongue, you protect your identity. Any nation has formed in time, since its genesis, its own way of feeling and thinking about the world, building such a distinct identity from other nations. In developing this identity language occupies a dual role: 1) focuses and reflects a certain view on the world; 2) shapes the vision of the speaker (individually and collectively) on the world. The national spirit is transmitted into language, and thereby language and specificity become consubstantial. At an international level, the subject of our paper is of interest as it explains the complicated mechanisms the Romanian language and its identity have suffered under the influences of other political, geographical and social factors. "What Romanians desire is freedom of spirit and of their conscience ... And because spirit and language are almost identical, language and nationality also, it is easy to see that Romanians want themselves, want their nationality .... fully." (Eminescu, 1876) The unity of language is a sign of ethnic unity; identity of character and consciousness of belonging to the same ethnic unity are ensured and developed through language awareness; defending specific identity is done by defending the language. Developed over time, the national specifics of a nation is built and reflected in the language; within a relationship of interdependence; multiple factors have contributed to the development of spiritual civilization, of the specific spiritual dimension, some taking into consideration geographic coordinates, others the history of a nation, everything being transposed into language: The relationship language – national specificity enrols in the general relationship man - language - world defined very precisely by Eminescu with a phrase that predicted Heidegger’s almost identical formulation: "we are not masters of language, but language is our master." That is why language requires that specific brand identity of a nation and thereby develops inside the human – language relationship, one aspect of its sovereignty. In other words, language is a trademark, a logo of the identity of a nation, because it builds spiritual identity of a certain nation. Eminescu's phrase "Language is our sovereign" means, from this perspective, the establishment of a way of being human first through language.

Problem Statement

Any language policy aims to achieve two distinct social objectives, but closely interrelated: promotion of languages, on the one hand, and regulating relations between languages in contact, on the other hand. In fact, the promotion of a language is merely a response to its competition imposed by another language. This competition is the origin of any language policy. Moreover, existing language policies prove this: for example, the promotion of Catalan in Spain currently has the objective of counterbalancing the dominance of Spanish; promoting the French language in Quebec is aimed at countering the pressure of English; in Belgium, the Flemish community wants to save the language that is threatened by the dominance of the French language; Baltics (Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia), after the dismantling of the Soviet empire, have the same objective in relation to the Russian language.

This article tries to describe how Moldova and other nations evolved in terms of their language and also how Romanian language is well represented in the consciousness of many speakers in the world.

When we refer to Moldova it is important to understand that its people showed less firmness in this respect, adopting a linguistic compromise in terms of legislation that seemed to follow the purpose of rather establishing and legitimizing national-Russian bilingualism and Russian-national throughout the country. Although the state has used, until 2003, an official language policy oriented towards unilingvism (promoting the state language), Russian language was granted, in fact, all the rights and privileges it had during U.S.S.R. The disguised will of the Moldovan authorities to restore the Moldovan-Russian bilingualism was explicitly mentioned in the conception of the National Policy of the Republic of Moldova.

So, despite the existing competition between Romanian and Russian in Moldova, the Moldovan authorities promote an ambiguous language policy. On the one hand, it is inspired by the idea that language is a symbol of the nation-state (Bârliba, 2009) (which led, it seems, to the promotion and declaration of the Moldovan language (but not Romanian) as an official language in Moldova), on the other hand, Russian language has the status of a language of interethnic communication. Although in Chisinau a political compromise was adopted, as mentioned above, the authorities in Tiraspol without any embarrassment continue to promote a policy of discrimination against Romanians and speakers of this language. Although Transnistria has declared three official languages (Russian, Ukrainian and "Moldovan"), the Russian language has remained dominant in all spheres of social and political life. Library funds are completed mostly with Russian literature, while kiosks in towns and district centres have no newspapers or magazines in Romanian, published west of the Dniester river, and "the single Moldovan newspaper in Romanian language is below any level, that is 'Moldovan language". This policy contributes to the progressive degradation of the Romanian language, but "the worst element in this equation is the alien alphabet". The more time we depart from the proclamation of independence, the language policies dependent on Russian language. The current language policy does nothing to prevent the development of Romanian language in Moldova. Its future in this space depends on the language policy which will be promoted in the coming years.

Research Questions

The research hypothesis we built our paper around, concentrate on finding the answer to two questions:

• The political issues with which Moldova was faced during the last century has taken a toll on the people, their identity, their language.

• Regardless of the identity that Macedonians and other Balkan Vlachs assume, the common origin with north-Danubian Romanians is indisputable.

"Today the language covers areas from Satmar to the White Castle near the Dniester River, from Hotin to the military border, today the tradition is one thing, the race is another and ethnologically we are talking about the same people ..."(Eminescu, 1990). Opponents of the term "Romanian language" ought to vote art. 13 of the Constitution of Moldova in the wording proposed by honest scholars "The State Language (official) of Moldova is Romanian." This is the one and only way for our nation to survive in the Romanian nearly ancestral land now called Moldova. If in the first years after the annexation of Bessarabia in 1812 the Prut river still was not a linguistic border or even a political one, then, in "1878 this river was closed to all communication and the tsarist regime created such a situation, that those who ought to continue the Moldovan tradition in Bessarabia and cultivate the literary language began to go abroad. The keepers of the sources and the national traditions remained the people. A leading researcher on the history of education in Moldova, Tudor Cibotaru an educational scientist, wrote: "No empire after its collapse has left behind so much darkness and ruin as the Russian empire. There is no Moldovan school that has functioned in its mother tongue. So there could be no national frameworks for the teaching of Romanian literature, history, geography, etc. The maternal verb could not be heard even in church ... over 90 per cent of the native population was illiterate" (Cibotaru, 1993). The issue regarding educating national conscience has changed radically after the Union of 1918. In Bessarabia most schools (all grades) were operated for 22 years (until the summer of 1940) in Romanian. Teaching was provided by teachers invited from the Kingdom, as well as by those from Bessarabia, which in a few years of study in different educational institutions managed to obtain the diplomas of primary and secondary school teachers, filling in the positions in our schools. We have some incomplete data on education in Bessarabia in 1940 (before the entry into action of the odious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact): in this "region" 2,700 primary schools were operating with a staff of 17,400 Romanian students; 25 vocational schools and industrial gymnasiums; two university faculties (theology and agriculture). The total number of teachers in these educational institutions exceeded 8,000 people. Now, at a distance of seven decades, one can say with all certainty that the 22 years of Romanian school in Bessarabia contributed to the awakening of Moldovans from their deadly-like sleep in which they were sank in by "barbaric tyrants", to educate them in the national spirit of unity of nation, language, history and ancient traditions, they instilled Basarabians dignity and national pride, they have developed true national conscience. But following the spring of 1944 ... Almost all intellectuals, primarily teaching staff for fear of deportations to Siberia took exile, taking refuge across the Prut River. "In the period 1940-1941 and in the years immediately after the war the Bolshevik regime had carried out an action persevering decimation of local Bessarabian intellectuals, arresting them, deporting or forcing them to emigrate"(Levit, 1995). The deepest repercussions and the most serious ones of the above phenomenon supported the formation of national consciousness of younger generations. At the university departments and secondary schools came many educated people with an anti-national, anti-Romanian spirit, which had the Party mission to infiltrate into the minds of dozens of series of graduates from different places in order to support the idea that Moldovans in Bessarabia are not Romanian, that their language is Moldovan, not Romanian, that they form a nation apart, separated by the Prut, the Russian alphabet (Cyrillic) is most appropriate for "Moldovan" because it is " our ancestor’s" and Latin was imposed on us by the " Romanian occupiers of Bessarabia" in 1918. On the basis of such nonsense and enormities the national consciousness of several generations in Bessarabia was formed in the post-war period; today this generation has reached the maximum age of 65-75 years, and they, perhaps unwillingly, neglect, reject, sometimes hate what is Romanian (language, history, culture). In all the years of Soviet power the deformation of national consciousness continued, this time at a new "qualitative" level. On the one hand, language has never been stopped (as in the Tsarist period), but on the other hand, the language was banned to be called Romanian, an aberrant "theory" was invented instead regarding the so-called "Moldovan language" different from the Romanian language. On the one hand, there was talk of the flourishing national language, on the other hand, the so-called Moldovan-Russian bilingualism was promoted by all means, after which the Moldovans had to know necessarily both Russian, and Russo phones continued to communicate at any level in public, only in Russian. On the one hand, the national educational system was propagated and on the other hand, it was suggested the idea that students in schools in "Moldovan language" had no future, because in all institutions of higher education in the "Great Soviet Union" the language used was Russian. Therefore, if you wanted to get there, you had to graduate a Russian school. The official pharisaic policy in the field of ideology was all too transparent. On the one hand, they spoke of "increasing national frameworks, the development of native culture," and on the other hand, the idea that "Moldovan language" is poor, with no traditions, that it lacks the terminology foundations, that science cannot be done in such a language was tacitly promoted. Moldovan parents in such conditions had nothing else to do but to send their children to Moldovan-Russian or Russian kindergartens and schools, in which the dominant language was Russian. The perversion of their national consciousness started form the Moldovan-Russian joint institutions, invented ad hoc by the old regime. The golden dream of the totalitarian regime was well known: make the Bessarabian Romanian forget as quickly as possible its native language - Romanian, its history - Romanian history, traditions, faith in God and to be transformed into homo Sovieticus – a brain-washed individual, indoctrinated to the brim with all sorts of "internationalist" theories, indifferent to the fate of his nation. The results were not long awaited. In kindergarten and in Russian schools every third (sometimes second) child was Moldovan almost all technical schools and higher education institutions switched to teaching in Russian, funds of the scientific and public libraries were completed basically with works in Russian (80-90%). It is not hard to imagine that graduates of such institutions against their will, became a kind of "intellectual janissaries", forgetting their national culture and, above all, Romanian. Eventually the so-called national cadres at all levels were Russified in all aspects (starting of course with the language), reaching the state in which they were no longer able to communicate professionally in Romanian. The tragic process of national consciousness alteration of Moldovans was manifested by official denial of some people regarding their mother tongue (then called "Moldovan") in favour of Russian. Alarmingly: continuous decline of the domestic genofund lead not to the strengthening, but to the gradual loss of national consciousness of Moldovan Romanians, to the apparition of an attitude somewhat indifferent to it, as it happens today, for instance, in our former historical territories Ismail, Akkerman, Hotin, Chernivtsi etc. An eloquent example is given to us by the eastern districts of Moldova. In 1924, when, for political purposes, the Moldovan A.S.S.R. was formed as a part of the Ukrainian S.S.R., Moldovans were living more or less compact in each of the 13 districts of the autonomous republic. Seven of them in 1940 were reclassified and united to Ukraine. And now we ask: what has happened to Moldovans from these districts? Do they retain their national consciousness as before? Do they have favourable conditions for doing so? It's not hard to imagine that many of them were already assimilated, and the others are about to be absorbed both linguistically and ethnically. Similar situations regarding the fate of the nation can be found in other countries. Thus Aromanians in Greece in 1926 reached 150,000 souls, in 1953 their number dropped to 37,000, and "now the Greek state does not recognize that national minorities still exist"(Ciobanu, 2007). Aromanians are nowadays in a landlocked identity crisis. Each state’s Academies support their own theories about the Aromanian origin: Romanian, Macedonian or Greek Romanized Latinophones. Even some Aromanian specialists have integrated and adopted the academic trends in the country they live in, which causes a bigger issue among Aromanians in Romania, Albania, Macedonia and Greece. Springs and historiography mention them by various names: Vlach, Vlasic Macedo, Macedonian, Farsherot, Saracaceni, Armani, etc. We are talking about an inadequate optics (even a wrong one) about the notions of language and dialect, language and speech, the official language (literary) and spoken language (popular), language and state, nation and people. Regardless of the identity that Macedonians/Aromanians and other Balkan Vlachs assume, the common origin with north-Danubian Romanians is indisputable. Of course, we must respect everyone's right to define their own identity. The European Council Report about Macedo/Aromanians and the Recommendation no.1333/1997 determines only the frame for saving the cultural identity of the Aromanians. In order to save their culture, the Macedonians need much more than bellicose statements in the press, depending on the identity option. Saving their own identity and defining it is in their hands, they just have to look for the common denominator of all the associations that represent them.

Purpose of the Study

As long as Romanians (we refer to those from abroad) are aware of their real ethnic allegiance (even if only to a Romanian province) we cannot talk about the language disappearance, no matter how strong the pressure of the Russian language is. The unity of Daco dialects reflects upon the spiritual unity of Romanians. No matter where history has determined their place of living, Romanians, speaking the language of their parents, are aware of their ethnicity. The consciousness factor - in the broadest sense of the word - is crucial in maintaining the language. A group of Romanian dialects used in the alien environment is present in Moldova. "Alien environment" is a misnomer in this context, but we use it because Romanian, for a long time, did not actually work there, as an official language of the state. Its literary appearance, characterized, inter alia, by promoting some features of local dialects, is subjected, like the dialects spoken, to pressures from the state language - Russian. As it is known, some linguists have pretended to accept the official view on the status of the Romance language being different from thr Romanian Bessarabian local idiom. Accepting this was motivated by the false perspective that Moldovan would become a dialect of that specific province and that it would develop as a distinct language. Linguists worthy of all our respect struggled to demonstrate, obtaining no serious evidence, that "Moldovan" is the 11th Romance language, actually the 14th, because it was sustained at the same time - and needed to be argued - that Romance languages different from Romanian are the three dialects at the south of the Danube: Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro. The alleged "Moldovan language is only literary Romanian written with a Russian alphabet slightly modified (i.e. modern Cyrillic, different from old Cyrillic in palaeoslavonic used for centuries by all Romanians) with some concessions regarding some dialectal Moldovan forms, known moreover, within the borders of Romania ". There are not any linguistic traits that would isolate the northern region of Bessarabia from the rest of Dacoromania. Even in the case of more distant areas in the East in which Moldovan, the general character of the spoken Romanian language from the east and the north of Dacoromanians can be recognized. In some cases, we can even meet traits from Transylvania and Crisana, as, for example, conjunctive with “și” and palatal dentals t’, d’ from k ', g' (înt’ină < închină) etc., explainable, largely through pastoral transhumance and migrations from various causes of the population of Transylvania until far beyond the Prut and Nistru. Bessarabia region (including Bucovina) could be broken up into three major areas: northern, middle and southern, each group into its respective group at the right of the Prut. In the north area peculiarities of Maramures are met and in the South, Wallachia some other specific features. All these areas, whose existence is justified by the social history of Moldova, may represent local dialects of the Moldovan sub dialects. That is why Bessarabia is not the sixth Dacoromanian language. In Bessarabia the vocabulary seems full of Russian words from the sphere of modern civilization, the macadam phrasings and many other words (ie linguistic clichés) not adapted (or adapted in part) to the language morphology. Grigore Brâncuş believes that the latter will disappear as soon as the Romanian language as the official language will work thoroughly in the state and will regenerate continuously adapting to the innovations of the national language. In general, Bessarabia and the entire Moldova, go with the area north of Dacoromania. The grammar of Romanian dialects from abroad is resistant, unaltered, unitary, is identified with the common grammar. Influences did not intervene at all in our language morphology. (Brâncuş, 1995)

Research Methods

The research method that we used in this paper was textual semiotics and this choice was made mainly because we wanted to emphasize the fact that language is constructed and inherited to express ideas, feelings and concepts. Achieved through the efforts of several generations of scholars, modern literary Romanian language today presents all the means to allow the expression of a high culture. Building on the contribution of all Daco dialects, learning and using it does not raise special problems yo its speakers, regardless of the geographical area in which they live and regardless of their cultural background. For the same reason the influence of the literary language on the dialects is very big the effort to abandon the peculiarities of speech being minimal. As for the dialects south of the Danube, although there have been attempts to achieve for some of them a literary form, even if these attempts would have succeeded, possible variations of the literary language would not have developed enough and would have stayed only dialects of literary Romanian. Therefore, it is not normal nowadays to further strive for the formation of literary dialects, their existence no longer being a feature of the current era. In these circumstances, the only way to help preserve the traditions of the speakers of dialects, to develop their culture and to strengthen the national consciousness is acquiring Romanian literary language a carrier of the European culture and a mean for expressing ideas in any field of activity. For the Eastern European Romantic languages, Romanian literary language remains the only way to preserve the ethnic, cultural and scientific development and progress while maintaining all national spiritual values (Oprea, 1991).

Findings

Conclusion

The original contribution to the domain refers to the fact that from a linguistic and ethnic perspective, the ethnic and linguistic identity of Romanians outside the borders of our country was discussed and that some theoretical concepts were clarified, concepts that can only be achieved by cultivating the spirit of Romanism, as a distinct ethnic group, through the written word and through religious services in church.

The paper also emphasized on the fact that all Romanians north and south of the Danube, living abroad are threatened by the danger of acculturation. We understand through this aspiration and even attaching to an official culture official of another language; and we understand that this state of acculturation (ad culture) is the first step towards denationalisation. Regarding the option for Romantic languages, the question remains the instrument of communication, namely: which aspect of the Romanian language must be cultivated? The use of a literary or native language or both?

Also, another original contribution to the field refers to the fact that, Daco dialects are an inexhaustible source of enrichment of the language, which must be preserved and cultivated by all means.

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