Sprachliche Verhältnisse und Restrukturierung sprachlicher Repertoires in der Republik Moldova

The sociolinguistic situation in the Republic of Moldova is among the most complicated within the cultural space of Europe today. It is complicated by the lingering legacy of the Soviet experiment, by the endemic poverty of the population and by the broad range of daily dis-cursive practices negotiated in Moldovan communities. By taking a deep ethnographic look at two such communities (a rural school and an urban workplace), this book provides an analysis of the situation in Moldova that is revealing and nuanced in both its description of the cases and its theoretical explanations of them.

Aside from the concepts of language relations and linguistic repertoires that appear in the title, the study is organised around the analysis of Erreichbarkeit (access) and Reichweite (literally, reach, but similar to status, functional scope or vitality) with regard to particular repertoires. All of these terms are explicated in great detail in the first two chapters, drawing on a wide range of previous studies, but also leaning heavily on the ideas of Utz Maas, whose work might be less familiar to Anglophone sociolinguists. This theoretical background is followed by elaborate discussions of the ethnographic field methods used as well as the historical and cultural context of contemporary Moldova. These discussions provide a foundation for understanding the case studies that follow, but they also often include more depth than might be warranted given the likely audience for the book (sociolinguists and post-Soviet social theorists). To this point, a shorter discussion of language minoritisation processes and how they apply to Moldova would have led more directly to the key elements explored in the two broad case studies.

The first case study (in Chapter 5) focuses on several teachers at a secondary school in an anonymous village (U.) in the north of Moldova where the majority language is a dialect of Ukrainian. Like most of the linguistic minorities in the former Soviet Union, rural Ukrainian speakers were generally educated in Russian during Soviet times, a practice that continues today, although the status of and access to the official language of Moldova (interchangeably called Romanian or Moldovan) is gradually increasing. Combined with a moderately emergent Ukrainian identity and the pressures of global English, this sociolinguistic situation is rich with complexities. The case study explores each relevant language variety and its role in the school, as well as the place of the school in the community, before diving into deeply revealing examinations of three language teachers, one each of Ukrainian, English, and Romanian. The analysis shows how individual actors are both constrained by access/ status restrictions and challenged into creative use of their repertoires by the sociolinguistic context of the school.

The 37-page case study of Iolanda (the English teacher), for instance, covers many details of her linguistic background, practices and ideologies, as elicited during observations and a 45-minute interview. The discussion explores numerous aspects of her upbringing and education in Russian in the village (U.), with several opportunities to acquire Romanian and Ukrainian along the way. Her career as a teacher of English and French is marked by complications such as a shortage of access to immersion into these languages and the contradictory facts that several families in the village have members working abroad in France at the same time that most families want their school-age children to learn English. The author’s treatment of these many facets of her linguistic repertoire and their connections to the school and community provide a nuanced understanding of the sociolinguistic tensions and decisions that are reported.

The second case study (Chapter 6) is slightly shorter, but just as impressive in its depth and attention to detail. It focuses on language use in a call-center in the capital city, Chișinău, which provides service to Italian customers. While the work of the telephone operators is in standard Italian, the competing roles of Russian and Romanian in the city’s private sector are also evident in the case study in that informal and formal registers in the office depend largely on the linguistic preferences and job status of the participants. The chapter explores three social actors (employees) with divergent backgrounds and language practices. Two female telephone operators (Natalia and Oksana) are contrasted, followed by a discussion of the language biography and practices of the male company director (Eugen). As with the studies of the teachers in U., the discussion here provides a rich palette of anecdotes and examples to illustrate the types of complexity found in the daily negotiation of linguistic repertoires in Moldova.

The final chapter organises the study’s conclusions around seven theses related to language access and reach. These include insights such as reach being a necessary but not a sufficient condition for language acquisition and the fact that access and reach vary depending on relationships and context. The theoretical implications here are well connected to specific details of the two case studies, making the conclusion a useful reference for readers who are more interested in the theory than the particulars of Moldova. Similarly, the book contains an extensive bibliography and index that facilitate further exploration.

In sum, the book is an impressively detailed and theoretically grounded contribution to the growing body of work on contemporary Moldova written in German. From the perspective of sociolinguistic theory, its contributions to our understanding of language practice in complex multilingual contexts, particularly as regards the concepts of language access and reach, go well beyond the borders of the Republic of Moldova and recommend it quite broadly. As such, it will appeal to scholars in both areas: Moldovan or Southeast European studies and theoretical sociolinguistics. The only criticism of the book is that its length and complexity might make it difficult for some potential readers to find relevant sections or information. For the careful and patient reader, the book provides a long series of opportunities to experience the multilingual daily life of educated professionals in Moldova, with numerous insights into the nature of human language use along the way.