Since 1812 the area of what is the Republic of Moldova has been subject to heavy language planning first from Imperial Russia, then internal nationalist movements, Soviet Russia, and once again internal nationalist movements. Moldova today is a multi-nation state heavily influenced by culture and language pulls from the East and from the West. The majority of its residents speak a dialect of Romanian but a strong influential minority speaks Russian. This paper first looks at the historical influences leading up to the 1989 Language Laws that established Moldovan as the official language, but gives significant minority status to Russian. It follows the shifts in allegiance displayed by the official legal documents of 1991 Declaration of Independence, what it means for breakaway Transnistria, and the 1994 Constitution. Then this paper looks at the chosen national anthems after 1991 and that despite celebrating its multi-lingual heritage, the anthem demonstrates the constructed nation that Moldova really is. This construction is confirmed by the former left-wing president, Vladimir Voronin, Moldovan citizens, as well as the 2003 Romanian-Moldovan dictionary. Finally, this paper shows the cautious shift of the pro-Western alliance of 2009-present to acknowledge the state language is Romanian. 
The primary terms that demonstrate this paper’s thesis are corpus planning and status planning. The former term explains how the vocabulary of a language is expanded by borrowing from a larger neighbor. In this case, numerous Russian loan words demonstrate this. The latter term concerns the elevation of the language to public official usage. According to Fishman, this elevation takes place when it is “implemented in the arenas of material statuses, reward, and pursuits – particularly in the work-place or marketplace, in government offices and operations, and in the institutions and processes of literacy”. After the eastern territory of Bessarabia (roughly present day Moldova excluding Transnistria) was annexed to the Russian empire in 1812, the local language was at first ignored and then banned from public usage. In the mid 19th century Karl Marx wrote, “The Romanian language is a kind of Oriental Italian. The indigenous population of Moldo-Wallachia call themselves Romanians; their neighbors call them Vlachs or Valachs”. During the 19th century and before, the alphabet was a Latin-Cyrillic hybrid unique to the region. The first liberation movements around the turn of the 19th-20th century rallied around the Romanian language and Latin alphabet in order to separate themselves from their Russian imperial legacy. Between 1918-1940 Moldova was fully a part of Romanian borders and language.
 When the country was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, the loan words became more frequent, deliberate, as well as introducing the Cyrillic language. Russian became the administration language and “Linguists advanced a new theory of the origins of the “Moldavian “ language, that it was at least partially Slavic in origin”.  This was a deliberate move on the part of the Soviet Union to separate Moldovans from their neighbors to the west. At the same time, across the whole USSR in “1938 the teaching of Russian as a second language was decreed for all minorities; scripts that had been Arabic or Latin were replaced with Cyrillic; and Russian loanwords were required for new intellectual and technical concepts”.
