When the Communists won the elections in 2001, president Vladimir Voronin began a campaign for Moldova’s unique identity.

“Our language” also being the language referred to in the national anthem of the same name.

President Voronin essentially holds the same view that “our language” is Romanian, but he maintains the right to call it Moldovan. He says, “The Moldovan Republic's Constitution says that the country's national language is Moldovan, not Romanian. Yes, they are identical. But historically it’s called Moldovan, and it’s going to stay that way”. His crusade continues on through the decade. In January 2008 he was giving a speech at the European Commission and when he was only provided with a Romanian interpreter, “the little makeshift booth housing the interpreter initially sported a sign saying ‘English -- moldovenesc.’ Before the long wait for the press conference was over, however, the sign had disappeared. European Commission officials had apparently been advised that it offended the sensitivities of EU member Romania.” When the she came out of her booth, “she told RFE/RL she was Romanian.”.  

At a conference in Munich, the Romanian Foreign Minister Adrian Cioroianu addressed President Voronin in French about the advantage their respective countries share because they speak the same language.  The president responded in Russian, “I have answered a million times, and I will answer again a billion times: It's up to the population to name its country's language…We held a referendum on October 1, 2004, in which 87 percent defined their language as Moldovan”. This political stubbornness is nothing new. “During the Soviet occupation, at meetings between Romanian and Moldovan officials, Moldovan officials…insisted that translators be used”. The citizens of Moldova also know that it’s about ideology, not history.  In February 2008 RFE/RL went to Chisinau to ask locals what they thought. One man said that even though Russian has modified Romanian, “It is easy to realize that we do not need translators between two brothers, who can understand each other alone. Mr. Voronin mixes up two things: his political ideology with the roots of this people and the history of this people". According to the 2003 Stati dictionary, this is also true.  With numerous directly Romanian words, it means Moldovans speak Romanian and vice versa.
In 2003, the Moldovan language made a monumental step in corpus planning with the Vasile Stati dictionary, written by a “left-wing politician and linguistic champion of ‘Moldovanness’”. Yet the work is recognized as a “bogus dictionary” and “piece of nonsense” by The Moldovan Institute of Linguistics. In trying to prove how separate the two languages are, it only succeeded in proving how they are alike and the lengths politicians will go to make an ideological stance.  The book was compiled partly in response to Adrian Năstase, one time Prime Minister of Romania, who insisted he needed to see a dictionary before he’d call the language Moldovan. Năstase once “jokingly pretended to switch from Romanian to Moldovan during the course of a speech”. Many of the words are not even translations and then some “translations” are just “instances where the medial “î / â” distinction occurs, written with a medial “î” rather than “â” and so conform to Moldovan rather than standard Romanian orthography… Stati is obliged to concentrate almost exclusively on vocabulary, rather than linguistic, differences in the dictionary”.  Typical of the vocabulary are different words for a cucumber, where as in Romanian, the same word means “melon”12. 
