The Economics of a Language

The 31st of August is an official holiday in Moldova. It is supposed to celebrate 'our language.' In 1989, 'our language' was considered the Romanian language, the mother tongue of the Moldovans of Romanian descent (about 70% of Moldova's population). At that time, such celebration of the Romanian language complemented the national revival of the Republic of Moldova. The mother tongue of the majority people in the former Soviet Moldavia has been neglected for a very long time, therefore the joy of those Moldovans can be well understood. It was then when the Romanian language was declared the official state language.

Since then, obviously, the languages have not changed. My mother tongue continues to be Romanian. What has changed is the government, opinions and politics. For example, the current government prefers to call the same language Moldovan, and pays less attention to celebration of Our Language holiday. In a political realm, this is understandable.

What is less acceptable is the public cost of politicizing the language issue. After 15 years of independence, the number of those who cannot communicate in Romanian is relatively large.

From among all costs that the Moldovan government has transferred on to citizens (education, health, housing, etc.) those deriving from learning the state language should have been the least problematic and painful. But judging by the continuously large number of non-Romanian speaking citizens, the incentive to learn the language has been low. Instead of bearing the costs of communicating its policies to these citizens (e.g. translating all legal and normative acts, official documentation, government web-sites, on-line publications into Russian), as it has been doing for several years now, I think the government should defer these costs on to those citizens, thus creating the needed incentive to learn the state language.