attitudes toward bilingualism: a case study of the

JoLIE 1/2008

ATTITUDES TOWARD BILINGUALISM: A CASE STUDY OF THE

MOLDOVAN-RUSSIAN BILINGUALS

Elena Buja Transilvania University of Braşov, Romania

Abstract The present paper aims at presenting the attitudes the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals have both toward Romanian and toward the former dominant language, Russian as well as the attitude of the two groups of monolinguals toward the afore-mentioned bilingual people. To this aim I have interviewed a couple of Moldovan students studying at ‘Transilvania’ University of Brasov and accessed a number of internet forums. Hopefully the findings of the analysis will bring to light a positive bilingual attitude and behaviour on the part of my subjects. Key words: bilingualism, language attitudes, linguistic prejudice. 0. Introduction The former USSR and was a pluralistic society in which cultural and ethno-racial groups contributed to the whole, at the same time trying to retain their original character. One characteristic of these groups may be their language or their dialect. In the long period of Soviet domination, most of the ethnic groups living in the former USSR tried to stick to their culture, and to their mother tongue, too. One such group is constituted by the people of the Republic of Moldova, a large territory which was disputed by Romania and the Soviet Union. In 1944, at the end of WWII, Moldova became part of the Soviet Union. Under these circumstances, Russian became the dominant language in this area, the speakers of the non-dominant ‘Moldavian’ dialect having limited opportunities of using their mother tongue.

The historical events that took place in Eastern Europe starting with 1989 have given this part of the world the chance for a new beginning. Thus, one advantage of the ‘new era’ was that the people belonging to the former Communist Block were now able to travel more freely. As a consequence, many young Moldovans (many of them born at the beginning of the 1990s) were encouraged to come and study in the mother/sister-country, Romania. This had both advantages and disadvantages, as the comments of the subjects of the present study will reveal.

Since all the subjects in this study speak two languages, the paper will focus on issues pertaining to bilingualism, defined by L. Bloomfield (1933) as the situation in which a person has acquired two languages in a native-like manner, the degree to which s/he masters both these languages being relative. Since bilingualism is a very broad topic, I will most importantly concentrate on the attitudes the Moldovans have

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toward their bilingual behaviour and toward the status it is assigned in their community. Also of interest would be the attitude they have with respect to Russian and the Russian speakers living in Moldova: do they adopt an attitude of linguistic chauvinism, or ‘linguistic prejudice’, as Wardhaugh (2002: 114) calls it, or do they rather look up to the language of the Russian culture? On the other hand, it would be also interesting to see the attitude the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals have toward Romanians and the Romanian language: if they have experienced any negative discrimination or if they have been embarrassed for their peculiar pronunciation of Romanian. Also investigated will be the attitudes of the monolinguals in Romania and the Republic of Moldova) toward the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals. I. Research methodology and ethical issues The tools I have used for the study are interviews which I conducted with 5 of my Moldovan students (one boy and four girls) within the premises of our university. Prior to the encounter with my informants I asked them whether they would be willing to provide me with information concerning their bilingual behaviour. Since all of them proved eager to participate in a research study, I devised a set of general questions concerning their acquisition and use of Romanian and Russian, but, as it always happens with interviews, a number of other questions emerged during the process of investigation. All interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed.

Another tool I used to investigate the Moldovan-Russian bilingualism is the Moldovan internet forums where people are expressing their views regarding their language. I was basically interested in their opinion concerning the use of Russian or regional terms as well as their views concerning their mother tongue.

Out of ethical reasons, the students I interviewed will be referred to by using their first names only. As for the forum participants, I have used their nicknames. To save space, the Romanian fragments excerpted from the interviews and forums will be rendered in English. They will be quoted in Romanian only in those cases when this is really relevant. III. The analysis The premises I have started from are the following: a) due to the long period of Russian domination and of the abuses committed by the Russian communists, I expect Moldovans to have hard feeling about both the language and the speakers of this language; b) I also expect some negative attitudes of the monolingual Romanians toward the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals due to their ‘imperfect’ use of the Romanian language and consequently potential embarrassment experienced by the Moldovans and lack of self-confidence when using Romanian.

Attitudes toward bilingualism: a case study of the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals 115

A. Attitude of the Romanian monolinguals towards the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals I shall start the study by presenting first the attitudes expressed by the monolingual Romanians toward the Moldovans and their language. The messages posted on chat forums revealed mixed feelings of the Romanians. Some feel sympathetic toward both the Moldovans and their language. This is the case of a forum visitor called inginerum (Sep 2 2003, 12:43) who posted the following message: 1

It is the same language … only that the Moldovans across the Prut speak the Moldavian dialect we have here, only with another accent and with many archaisms…. Believe me … I live in Iassy and I have faculty mates from Chisinau, Balti a.s.o.… and they are Romanians indoctrinated by communism, and their language remained for most of them at the level it was in the 50s and the 60s because of the lack of introduction of neologisms as was our case, and because of many other reasons.

Another visitor of the same forum, smcristi (Sep 2 2003, 23:03) expresses his disappointment at the Moldovan-Romanian dictionary conceived by V. Stati. He was searching for something on the Google engine when he came across news related to this dictionary which stirred his curiosity and made him dig deeper. He says:

(…) I came across the link http://moldova.net/viewtopic.php?t=4516&po...897e428cb348d30, this forum of our brothers across the Prut where this stupid dictionary was being talked about. (…) I find it weird that here people don’t talk about this dictionary, as they do not talk about the situation of the Romanians across the Prut who are forced to cut any ties with Romania and who are subjected to Russification. What I read on the forum seems very interesting in connection with their situation. As you can see on the forum, to an extent of 99% they employ the same words as we do, not what the dictionary says.

The most sympathetic attitude seemed that of the late G. Pruteanu, former vice-president of the Commission for education and science in Romania, expressed in the daily newspaper Cotidianul on July 30th, 2003:

It is not another language, but a language that has been maimed, jeered at. It is as if the Romanian language had come out, after a number of years, of an Auschwitz of the language. A man who spent some years in Auschwitz is not like he used to be. He is like a shipwreck, he looks awful. Well, this is the deplorable situation of Romanian over there, a situation that inspires pity.

Some other Romanian monolinguals have a neutral attitude: people simply express their puzzlement at not understanding what they are told, without making any comments. One such person is Iulia who recounts her experience with a fellow

1 http://forum.softpedia.com/lofiversion/index.php/t15538.html.

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Moldovan student.2 Most of her story below has been translated into English, but some sentences have been preserved in Romanian (and translated in brackets) in order to show the cause of puzzlement.

Once she was waiting for her boyfriend and seeing that he was not coming, she said: “offf, cre’ca s-o prapadit Gheorghe” (‘oh, I think that Gheorghe has died’). She meant to say that he had got lost. Another time she asked me: "cand ai venit mai era piteoarca aia afara?" (‘when you came, was that piteoarca still outside?’) Realizing that I did not understand, she confused me even more: “piteoarca, adica jigulie” (‘piteoarca, that is a jigulie’). What do you think she was talking about? A car, an old Russian-made Lada.

There are, nevertheless people who take pleasure in making fun of the old-fashioned, archaic façade of the Romanian spoken in Moldova. Thus, there is a site called overheard in Iasi which posts a lot of jokes related to the archaic speech of the Moldovans. The same ridiculing attitude is expressed by Billy who makes fun of the TV news he accidentally came across: 3 “I couldn’t help laughing at them. Long-unheard archaisms made me laugh my eyes out! (…) The Moldovans call a 24-hour shop an everlasting shop”.

Fortunately, such messages are rare. B. Attitude of the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals towards Romanian In an article entitled Despre naravurile moldovenilor (‘On the Bad Habits of the Moldovans’) and posted by Puiu on May 14th 2007, the writer presents the feelings experienced by a famous Moldovan poet (Grigore Vieru) when he first visited Romania. 4

Recently, in a Basserabian daily, a young poet from Chisinau was sharing his impressions on how he feels in Romania. The comparison he made was based on a general truth, namely that we, the foreigners, the immigrants, are regarded in the host-country as some kind of panda bears. Indeed, no matter how much we strive to look Romanian, in Romania we are seen as something exotic, picturesque, even unnatural : as some kind of Russian-Moldovan hybrids.

This first paragraph of the article clearly indicates a state of unease which many Moldovans coming to our country for various reasons experience. The same idea emerges from another article sent for publication in a monthly Romanian magazine (Magazin istoric) by a Moldovan girl, Inessa Baban, who had studied in Romania. 5 This article is entitled Suntem români si punctum ! (‘We are Romanian, full stop!’),

2 ttp://forum.desprecopii.com/forum/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=64540 3 http://forum.softpedia.com/lofiversion/index.php/t15538.html 4 http://www.stiri.romanism.net/?p=674 5 http://www.itcnet.ro/history/archive/mi2003/current11/basarabia.html


and begins as follows:

Every day spent in Romania is a new challenge. You challenge the puzzlement you read in the eyes of those who listen to you and try to decode the message you are trying hard to send. But despite your efforts to make yourself understood, you fail, so that the eyes of your interlocutor send back the question: ‘What does s/he mean to say? Oh, God, another cryptic message!’ Could it have been the accent? If it had been only for the accent….

Similar embarrassment was reported by three of my interviewees. Veronica, a first-year student, had to share a room with a Romanian girl. On hearing that Veronica was from the Republic of Moldova the Romanian student became quite distant until she learned that the only thing that made them different was the accent, not the language. Vadim reported feeling uncomfortable when realizing that he spoke with a different accent and that he used archaic/regional words. He recounted a talk with his university mates in which he used the expression ‘amu ia’ which is both archaic and regional, its present-day form being ‘acum’ (now). Due to a certain connotation attached to the string of sounds in Romanian, his male fellows started laughing, which embarrassed Vadim. Finally, Viorica mentioned the puzzlement caused among her Romanian room-mates by her use of the regionalisms prostire (Standard Romanian cearsaf ‘bed sheet’) and iorgan (ST. Rom plapuma ‘quilt’)

This is the reason why many of the Moldovan students/people in Romania do their best to improve their accent and they freely admit that, as the following quotes reveal: Vadim: “I have tried to get rid of my accent, but, still, I am very proud of the language I speak and it feels good when I use it with my compatriots”. Veronica: “I am trying hard to speak without a Moldovan accent, but I am capable anytime to switch back to the Moldovan dialect: ce faci (ST.Rom) – ci faci & shi fashi? (dialectal versions of ‘How are you?/What are you doing?)” Carolina: “You don’t have to try too hard to get rid of your accent because, once you are in a certain community, you get rid of it anyway”. I have encountered similar attitudes among the forum participants, some of them being very keen on improving not only their pronunciation but also their grammar and lexicon. Thus, on the forum suggestively entitled lataifas6 (‘chatting’), a topic suggested in 2003 was Reper grammatical (‘grammar issue’). Someone launched the following question: Do you think you need to improve your Romanian? Out of a total of 45 participants, 17 (37%) answered ‘Yes, definitely’, 23 (51%) answered ‘Yes; although I know it well, repetitio est mater studiorum’. One of the forum participants, Apollo, stated:

I am sure that most of us need to brush up the grammar of the Romanian

6 http://www/lataifas.net

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language. As long as you live in a society where Romanian is spoken with mistakes and as long as you don’t speak much Romanian, you have no chance of improving your knowledge of this language.

Comawhite, another participant in the discussion on the above-mentioned topic, highlights the deplorable situation of the Romanian language in Moldova:

The mistakes encountered on the forum are nothing compared to those made by the journalists who have recently graduated from the University. They make regrettable mistakes, of course, only some of them. Most of the current journalism students have no knowledge of grammar or stylistics. I know this for sure because I saw their attempts at writing while they were doing their practical training at various newspapers. Horrible!

In the exchanges that follow, Lelaina brings up the problem of pleonasms, to which Apollo answers as follows: “Lelaina, for sure we will not get rid of pleonasms (…)” Amelie: “(…) if everybody thought the way you do, our language would have never evolved… you have to try hard to correct yourself (…) Apollo: amelie, the Romanians also do it …. It is like some kind of disease that can be cured by motivation and desire (…)” Amelie: “(….) we still have a long way to reach them… for me the speech of those across the Prut is not at all an example … I would be glad if somebody corrected me when I say/write something incorrectly, so that the mistake will not happen again…”

The answer provided by Apollo to Amelie is worth quoting in Romanian, as it shows the way in which the language of the Moldovans differs from that of the Romanians:

Apollo: “amelie, nu ma socot mai inferior ca românii… Doamne fereste!! Ânsă limba ‘română’ vorbită in Rep. Moldova se diferă de lb. r. vorbită in R, din cauza aceasta si am spus că dacă romanii o fac (adică greselile gramaticale) … noi o vom face cu atat mai mult.” (‘amelie, I don’t consider myself more inferior than the Romanians… God beware! But the ‘Romanian’ spoken in the Republic of Moldova differs from that spoken in Romania, and for this reason I said that if the Romanians do it (I mean grammar mistakes)… we will make even more’.)

The underlined structures in the Romanian quotation indicate some differences between the two varieties of Romanian. Thus, socot (‘I think, I consider’) is an archaic term which in standard Romanian is replaced by cred/consider. The second underlined word Ânsă (‘but’) is misspelled, the correct form being însă (Romanian words starting with the [x] vowel are always spelled with an initial letter ‘î’). Thirdly, the verb a diferi is not reflexive, thus the reflexive particle se is useless. The writer might have confused a se deosebi (‘to be distinguished from’) with a diferi (‘to differ’). Finally, the clitic adverb şi should be positioned in between the auxiliary and the main verbs (am şi spus). All in all, these are minor mistakes that cannot be considered ‘language barriers’ defined by Moser (1972) (quoted in Ionescu-Ruxandoiu & Chitoran, 1975:257) as ‘obstacles that hinder communication in the mother tongue’.


C. Attitude of the Moldovans towards Russians and the Russian language In a community where different language groups coexist, language attitudes play an important role in the lives of the users of these languages. Haugen (1956) (quoted in Grosjean, 1982:117-118) is of the opinion that “whenever languages are in contact, one is likely to find certain prevalent attitudes of favour or disfavour towards languages involved. These can have profound effects on the psychology of the individuals and on their use of the languages”.

What is important to realize is that attitudes toward a language are often confounded with attitudes toward the users of that language. One of the premises of the study was that due to the conflicts between the Russians and the Moldovans, the latter might not have a positive attitude either toward the language or toward its speakers. To a very small extent this was confirmed by some messages posted on forums. Thus, suslik-luna, a participant in a forum of the Moldovans7 states the following:

I am Moldovan, but the first language I learned was Russian. Those were the times… the Russians (and the Ukrainians) were imported here incessantly and they did not learn Romanian! I know many who have lived here for generations and not only don’t they speak Romanian, but they don’t even want to learn it! The people here have been discriminated. Even nowadays it may happen that you enter a shop and hear the shop-assistant telling you in Russian ‘speak properly’ (meaning ‘Speak Russian because I don’t understand’). Can you imagine? To feel like a foreigner in your own country!

Another participant in the same forum, who signs his/her message rz, recounts another event:

Subjectively, it seems that Russian is more popular because when speaking to Russians, the Moldovans use Russian, while the Russians addressing Moldovans don’t speak Romanian. Here is an example that demonstrates that the ‘minority’ dictates … especially because in many institutions the civil servants are Russian. Once I saw how a woman (Russian) was almost shouting at an elderly woman who did not speak Russian and who could not understand a mistake that appeared in her bill…

Similar events were recalled by some of my Moldovan students. Viorica, who is from Cahul, said that 50% of the population in her home-town are of Russian origin. In shops, customers have to speak Russian, otherwise they are not served. Carolina who comes from Balti confirms this.

Despite the reluctance at being imposed the Russian language in certain circumstances, all my interviewees and most of the forum participants seem to like this language and use it frequently. Vadim told me that in some places in Moldova the Moldovan people speak Russian because they like it better than Romanian. Both

7 http://forum.softpedia.com/lofiversion/index.php/t15538.html.

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the elderly people and the youngsters prefer Russian to Romanian. He is of the opinion that culture affected their attitude toward the language. In their everyday speech, when Moldovans want to emphasize something, they say: După cum spune rusul (‘as the Russian says’). Veronica, another respondent in the interview, told me that she has no negative feelings either toward the Russians or their language. Once she heard some tourists speaking Russian in Brasov and this made her homesick. Carolina, another interviewed student said that despite the fact that she hated being imposed the Russian language, she likes it and uses it frequently.

Similar positive attitudes toward the Russian language were encountered among the messages posted on internet forums.8 Iuliu states “I am for writing in Romanian and then in Russian”. Creatza highlights the advantages of being bilingual, irrespective of the languages someone speaks:

indeed, we have to pay more attention to the language spoken in our country (…) do you want to say that you suffer because you can speak two languages? .. I will tell you that you have an extraordinary advantage; the Romanians who try to speak Russian do not succeed so well; I am pleased that I can speak Russian without any accent and Romanian impeccably.

Galiogstro, another member of the same forum states that he doesn’t make too much fuss about the language he uses, and the fact that he happens to speak Russian does not mean that he wants to speak only this language. In a later message (July, 31), the same person says that “I speak Russian when I want, not when Redactor decides. The same rule should be applied to news, I should be given the opportunity to choose, to read in Romanian or in Russian”.

The positive attitude of the Moldovans toward the Russian language is demonstrated by the frequent code-switching9 and code-mixing10. Vadim recounted some sentences uttered by his mother while still at home, in Tighina. The words originally spoken in Russian, but spelled with Latin letters, are capitalized:

Ia SHVABRA si spala pe jos (‘Take the MOP and clean the floor’)/Vezi ca mincarea e in HOLOGHENIK (‘The food is in the FRIDGE’).

The reason Vadim gave me for using Russian words when speaking Romanian

is that they better express concepts or feelings. ‘Russian is more expressive due to polysemy’, he said. He considers Russian to be a prestigious language. Thus, Vadim seems to be in line with Grosjean, who stated that “the prestige language is considered to be more beautiful, more able to express abstract thoughts, and the other language is felt to be ungrammatical, concrete and coarse” (1982:122).

8 http://forum.md/Discuss.aspx?id=85.9437&page=1#rep127 9 Code-switching is defined by Owens (2008:414) as “the shifting from one language to

another. The behaviour is not random, nor does it reflect an underlying language deficit”. Gumperz (1982:52) defines it as “the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems”.

10 Code-mixing is defined as the combination of a root/stem of one language with an affix of another language.


Veronica produced a mixed sentence when talking to her room-mate: Da-mi NOJikul (‘Give/pass me the knife!’), where noj is the Russian word for knife, while the ending –ul marks the masculine/neutral nouns in Romanian.

When asked why Moldovans insert Russian words in Romanian sentences, Ana answered that it is nicer, whereas Carolina said that “it is not nicer, but sometimes the Russian words are handier”.

Forum participants also seem to have a positive attitude toward Russian. Some post messages entirely in Russian, some others use this language for salutation formulas, as demonstrated below11, whereas a couple of them show a tendency of mixing Russian words in Romanian sentences12 (again the Russian words will be indicated by capitalised letters, whereas regionalisms will be underlined):

1. Nishka (01.12.2004): “unii chiar parca-s UKURINIIE (‘some (people) indeed seem high/drugged’) 2. KazeolNevozmojnii (01.13.2004): “sini aisi ii UKURENII?” (‘which of you are drugged?’) ian repede PRIZNAVAISEA (‘admit it quickly/ introduce yourself quickly’); ZA ZDAROVII OBRAZ JIZNI!” (‘for a healthier lifestyle!’) 3. Valerika (05.17.2004): “salutIK la toti cei noi … bine ati venit shi enjoy” (‘hello to all the new members…. welcome and enjoy’) 4. Melania (01.23.2005) “PRIVETIK PATZANI! Iaka mai avem un user nou – Stefan” (‘hello guys! Here we have a new user – Stefan’) 5. Melania (01.24.2005) “fă Meliuga … ce materialistă ai ajuns tu … am auzit că-ţi placea culoarea roz … la nebunie PRITOM … as putea să-ţi cumpăr niste sandali rozove … e bun?” (‘Meliuga, dear … how materialistic you have become … I have heard that you like pink …. very much indeed … I could buy you some pink sandals … is it OK?’) According to the classification of code-switches given by Poplack (1980) (quoted in Romaine, 1995:122-123), the examples under 1, 2 (the first two clauses) and 5 could be considered tag-switches, i.e. “the insertion of a tag in one language into an utterance which is otherwise entirely in the other language”. The last part of example 2 and example 4 are cases of inter-sentential switches, i.e. “switches at a clause or sentence boundary, where each clause or sentence is in one language or another” (Romaine, 1995:123).

Not all the excerpts presented above represent turns in the conversations (as the dates show). But if one took the time to read all the messages posted on this forum s/he might realize that these switches may serve as a subtle means of conveying the chatters’ “approval or disagreement or ambivalence about previous messages” (Holmes, 2008:43), to mark personalization vs, objectivization, and to show whether a statement reflects personal opinion or knowledge.

11 http://www.moldova.net/showthread.php?t=28 12 For the translation of the Russian words/sentences, I was helped by my student, Vadim.

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IV. Conclusions What I hoped to find out in this study was that the Moldovans do not regard themselves linguistically or culturally inferior to either the Russians or the Romanians and that they perceive the language they speak accepted and respected on both sides of their geographical borders. But in many cases my hopes were contradicted by my findings. Thus, some of the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals feel stigmatized due to their speech/language. But this stigmatization seems to have, nevertheless, a positive effect in that it reinforces the loyalty and solidarity of the group toward their language and the people. Grosjean (1982:126) states that “even though use of a stigmatized language may be associated with a less prestigious group -at least in the eyes of the majority group – it may reinforce the group’s positive values and symbolize solidarity for them.”

Despite the negative attitudes some of the Romanian and Russian monolinguals have toward the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals, most of the latter seem to have positive feelings toward Romanian and Russian. This is reflected, on the one hand in their efforts to brush up their Romanian and in the delight they take in speaking Russian or in switching from Romanian to Russian in their speech/writing, on the other hand. One reason why the people I investigated do not seem to have a negative attitude toward Russian is the fact that they learned it while still children and that most of them were born shortly before or after the events that led to the independence of the Republic of Moldova. References Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston. Grosjean, F. (1982). Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press. Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmes, J. (2008). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (3rd edition). London, New York: Pearson, Longman. Ionescu-Ruxandoiu, L. & Chitoran, D. (1975). Sociolongvistica. Bucuresti: Editura Didactica si Pedagogica. Owens, R.E. Jr. (2008). Language Development. An Introduction. (7th edition). Boston, Paris, Munich: Pearson Educational. Romaine, S. (1995). Bilingualism. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Wardhaugh, R. (2002). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. (4th edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

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