Moldavian dialect
| Moldavian | |
|---|---|
| Graiul moldovean or Graiul moldovenesc | |
| Native to | Moldova, Romania, Ukraine |
| Region | see geographic distribution |
| Ethnicity | Romanians |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | mold1248 |
The Moldavian dialect (Graiul moldovean or Graiul moldovenesc in Romanian) is one of several dialects of the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian). It is spoken across the approximate area of the historical region of Moldavia, now split between the Republic of Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine. The Moldavian dialect is one of the main regional varieties of the Daco-Romanian grouping of dialects, with consistent phonetic, lexical, and syntactic features that distinguish it from other dialects, including the Wallachian variety upon which the modern Romanian literary standard is based. Though largely mutually intelligible with other Romanian dialects nowadays, Moldavian retains both archaic elements and regional innovations that may or may not be shared with other dialects.
The Moldavian dialect can be considered a vernacular or 'speech' when contrasted with a standardized variety of the language existing within a particular social and economic context. In this case, Moldavian has increasingly approached such a classification due to dialect levelling, since the promotion of the Wallachian dialect, among others, as a basis for the standard variety of formal and literary Romanian, leading to a reduction of urban Moldavian varieties to primarily informal forms, and, for some speakers, to the level of merely an accent. However, Moldavian has historically evolved to the point of being a dialect, hence its present classification within currently complex sociolinguistic dynamics. This dialect has not been consistently written, except in specific historical and artistic contexts. In this instance, the Romanian orthography is generally used, or the Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet.