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| | WORLD ENCYCLOPAEDIA - Moldova - LANGUAGE, RELIGION, AND CULTURE (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07) |
 | | Stalin justified the creation of the Moldavian SSR by claiming that a distinct "Moldavian" language was an indicator that "Moldavians" were a separate nationality from the Romanians in Romania. |
 | | In 1989 members of most of the Moldavian SSR's nationalities claimed their national language as their mother tongue: Romanians (95 percent), Ukrainians (62 percent), Russians (99 percent), Gagauz (91 percent), Bulgarians (79 percent), and Roma (82 percent). |
 | | Although both Romanian written in the Cyrillic alphabet (that is, "Moldavian") and Russian were the official languages of the Moldavian SSR, only 62 percent of the total population claimed Romanian as their native language in 1979. |
| encyclopaedic.net /world/moldova/16.php (702 words) |
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