Dialectes périphériques sur les marges orientales de l’Europe: le moldave/roumain de Transnistrie et le tchango/hongrois de Roumanie entre velléités de standardisation et nivellement linguistique

Abstract

The two minority groups examined in the present study, the Hungarian-speaking Csángós of the Roman and Bacau region of Eastern Romania and the Romanian-speaking Moldavians of Transnistria in the Eastern part of the Republic of Moldova, have the common feature of being peripheral groups situated at a distance from other historical minorities (Transylvanian Hungarians and Bessarabian Romanians-Moldavians, respectively). On the basis of the official documents of the 1920’s and 30’s, this article discusses the different options which the political and cultural leaders were considering in order either to create an autonomous Moldavian language with maximum distance from the standard Romanian spoken beyond the Dniestr, or to simply adopt Romanian or, as a third option, to find a compromise between the former two with some degree of tolerance for the Russian influence. In parallel with this, the article evokes the case of the Hungarian Csángó dialect spoken in Romanian Moldova, which was also subject to different appraisals originating from several cultural centres in Bucharest, Budapest or Rome. The article intends to demonstrate by these two parallel cases the well-known fact that the creation of a new language is far from being an objective scientific issue. In the case of Moldavian, this attempt failed as early as the 1950’s, whereas in the Csángó case the high standard function is filled by Romanian, the standardisation of the local Hungarian dialect not being considered seriously by any of the parties concerned, despite some statements to the contrary.