Speak my language

I didn't know that Moldova was a country until I saw it in my east Europe guidebook. I knew it was some kind of place, I think, but maybe I thought it was a region in some other country, or a place that doesn't exist anymore like Byzantium of Czechoslovakia. Anyway, it is a country, right now, between Romania and Ukraine, with about 4.5 million people. (That is about one and a half Brooklyns, or 15 Icelands.)

I only recently (like, within the last week) decided to come to Moldova, and I haven't really done my homework; all I know about it is what the Lonely Planet and Wikipedia have to say and what I've seen in 1.5 days. Moldova used to be bigger, and Romanian-speaking, and called Moldavia, and controlled by (of course) the Ottomans. Then the Russians got it and made everyone learn Russian. There were wars and treaties and borders changed and eventually Moldova became one of the Soviet republics and now it is independent. Stalin apparently really pushed the idea of a Moldovan identity, distinct from Romanian. He decided that Moldovan was a separate language from Romanian (fucking dictators and their linguistic decrees) and switched it from the Latin alphabet to Cyrillic. (Romanian was originally written in Cyrillic and then changed to Latin, for whatever that's worth.) Now most everyone is bilingual (I think? -- it seems that way in Chisinau (the capital), anyway) and Moldovan (Romanian, whatever) is written in the Latin alphabet again. When I hear older people talking, it's almost always in Russian. Younger people mix it up; Romanian seems to be more common. The older people get kind of excited when I try to speak Russian; at first I thought it was a political statement that the younger people don't, but it probably has more to do with the fact that they mostly speak English a lot better than I speak Russian.

Language politics are sort of fascinating to me and I would like to understand them here. But this trip (the Moldova part of the trip, I mean) is super short. I hope I come back.

Also, the Moldovan cell phone company is called MoldCell.