Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What language is spoken in Moldova?
The state language of Moldova is Romanian, locally known as Moldovan, which is the native language of 80.2% of the population; it is also spoken as a primary language by other ethnic minorities. Gagauz, Russian and Ukrainian languages are granted official regional status in Gagauzia and/or Transnistria.
In the 2004 census, 2,564,542 people (75.8% of the population of the country) declared their native language as "Moldovan" or "Romanian"; 2,495,977 (73.8%) speak it as first language in daily use. Apart from being the first language of use for 94.5% of ethnic Moldovans and 97.6% of ethnic Romanians, the language is also spoken as primary by 5.8% of ethnic Russians, 7.7% of ethnic Ukrainians, 2.3% of ethnic Gagauz, 8.7% of ethnic Bulgarians, and 14.4% of other ethnic minorities.
Russians settled Moldova, which was then Bessarabia, after the Russian Empire incorporated Bessarabia in 1812. Moldavians under Russian rule enjoyed privileges well, the language of Moldavians was established as an official language in the governmental institutions of Bessarabia, used along with Russian. The publishing works established by Archbishop Gavril Bănulescu-Bodoni were able to produce books and lithurgical works in Moldavian between 1815 and 1820, until the period from 1871 to 1905, when Russification policies were implemented that all public use of Romanian was phased out, and substituted with Russian. Romanian continued to be used as the colloquial language of home and family, mostly spoken by Romanians, either first or second language. Many Romanians changed their family names to Russian. This was the era of the highest level of assimilation in the Russian Empire.
Russian Sign Language is the sign language of the Deaf community in Russia and Tajikistan, and possibly in neighboring countries such as Moldova and Georgia. (See also Lithuanian Sign Language, Mongolian Sign Language and Ukrainian Sign Language, all of which may be dialects of the same basic language.) Russian Sign has a grammar unlike the (spoken or written) Russian language, with much stricter word order and word formation rules. Russian Sign Language belongs to the French Sign Language family. Vocabulary from Austrian Sign Language also heavily influences Russian Sign Language.
Pecheneg is an extinct Turkic language spoken by the Pechenegs in Eastern Europe (parts of Southern Ukraine, southern Russia, Moldova, Romania and Hungary) in the 7th–12th centuries. It is also possible that the language was spoken by the Cumans, per Byzantine princess Anna Komnene.
The original written Latin language (what is today referred to as "Classical Latin") was adapted from the actual spoken language of the Latins, with some minor modifications, long before the rise of the Roman Empire. As with many languages, over time the spoken "vulgar" language diverged from the written language, with the written language remaining somewhat static. During the classical period spoken (Vulgar) Latin still remained largely common across the Empire, some minor dialectal differences notwithstanding. 
Most scholars agree that two major dialects developed from Common Romanian by the 10th century. Daco-Romanian (the official language of Romania and Moldova) and Istro-Romanian (a language spoken by no more than 2,000 people in Istria) descended from the northern dialect. Two other languages, Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian, developed from the southern version of Common Romanian. These two languages are now spoken in lands to the south of the Jireček Line.
The Pecheneg language, an extinct Turkic language once spoken in Eastern Europe (in what today is most of Ukraine, parts of southern Russia, Moldova, and Hungary) in the 7th–12th centuries, was "re-invented" for the movie.
The condition of human rights in Moldova has come under scrutiny in recent years, and human rights organizations within Moldova and around the world have spoken out against what they feel to be unfair suppression of the independent media, as well as other abuses.
As communist states began to collapse at the end of the 1980s, people in some areas of the Soviet Union began to demand sovereignty for separate national identities. As the citizens of the Moldavian SSR debated the merits of introducing Moldovan as the official language of the republic—at first with Russian as a second official language and later without—the republic was divided over the issue of nationalizing Moldova. One side believed that Moldova should be independent from the Moscow Kremlin and turned into a nation-state, possibly in a union with Romania where a virtually identical language is spoken. The other believed that Moldova should remain a part of the supranationalist USSR, possibly in a post-communist, but still united country.
Up to roughly 1340, the Romance languages spoken in the Middle Ages in the northern half of what is today France are collectively known as "ancien français" ("Old French") or "langues d'oïl" (languages where one says "oïl" to mean "yes"); following the Germanic invasions of France in the fifth century, these Northern dialects had developed distinctly different phonetic and syntactical structures from the languages spoken in southern France. The language in southern France is known as "langue d'oc" or the Occitan language family (a language where one says "oc" to mean "yes"), also known under the name of one of its dialects, the Provençal language). The Western peninsula of Brittany spoke Breton, a Celtic language. Catalan was spoken in the South, and Germanic languages and Franco-Provençal were spoken in the East.
The eastern Romance continuum is dominated by Romanian in many respects. Romanian is spoken throughout Romania and its dialects meet the Moldovan registers spoken across the border in Moldova. Romanians believe the Moldovan language to be a dialect (grai) of Romanian, but some separatist political forces in the Republic of Moldova claim that Moldovan is a separate language. Outside Romania, across the other south-east European countries, various Romanian language groups are to be found: pockets of various Romanian and Aromanian subgroups survive throughout Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, Albania and Croatia (in Istria).
The variety of Romanian spoken in Moldova is the Moldavian subdialect, which is also spoken in northeastern Romania. The two countries share the same literary standard.
In the population of 200,000 to 300,000 Roma, or Gypsy, people in Greece today, the Romani language is spoken widely. Romani is an Indo-Aryan language similar to many Indian languages, due to the origins of the Roma people in northern India. The dialect spoken in Greece (as well as in Bulgaria, Albania, the Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, parts of Turkey, and Ukraine) is known as Balkan Romani. There are 160,000 Romani speakers in Greece today (90% of the Roma population).
John H. Fisher, author of "The Emergence of Standard English", observes that in Spanish, Italian, French, and English, the written languages became standardised before the spoken languages, and that these provide frames of reference for what is considered standard speech. He said, in an interview for the Children of the Code project:
I came to the conclusion that all of the discussion of standardisation of language was a discussion of the written forms of language. It had nothing to do with spoken language. We don't have the spoken language standardised yet. When we say that we're speaking Standard English, what we're doing is transferring into our spoken vocabulary and syntax the elements of the written language. What is standard in what you and I are talking now is what we get from our writing.
There are grammatical constructions and words that one uses in speech that one generally avoids in written compositions. Even in the most colloquial of online chats, interjections such as "like" are rarer than in speech. 
The word "Moldavian" is also used to refer collectively to the north-eastern varieties of spoken Romanian, spread approximately within the territory of the former Principality of Moldavia (now split between Moldova, Romania and Ukraine). The Moldavian variety is considered one of the five major spoken varieties of Romanian. All five are written identically. There is no particular linguistic break at the Prut River, the border between Romania and Moldova.
The history of the Moldovan language refers to the historical evolution of the glottonym "Moldavian"/"Moldovan" in Moldova and beyond. It is closely tied to the region's political status, as during long periods of rule by Russia and the Soviet Union, officials emphasized the language's name as part of separating the Moldovans from those people who began to identify as Romanian in a different nation-building process. Cyrillic script was in use. From a linguistic perspective, "Moldovan" is an alternative name for the varieties of the Romanian language spoken in the Republic of Moldova (see History of the Romanian language).
The Lao language is descended from Tai languages spoken in what is now southern China and northern Vietnam in areas believed to be the homeland of the language family and where several related languages are still spoken by scattered minority groups.
In the Soviet Republic of Moldova, a special version of the Cyrillic alphabet derived from the Russian version was used until 1989, when Romanian language spoken there officially returned to the Romanian Latin alphabet, although in the breakaway territory of Transnistria the Cyrillic alphabet is used to this day.
The Gagauz language ("Gagauz dili, Gagauzça") is a Turkic language spoken by the Gagauz people of Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey, and it is the official language of the Autonomous Region of Gagauzia in Moldova. Gagauz belongs to the Oghuz branch of Turkic languages, alongside Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Crimean Tatar (considered Kipchak in some cases), and Turkish. Gagauz has two dialects, Bulgar Gagauzi and Maritime Gagauzi. Gagauz is a distinct language from Balkan Gagauz Turkish.
This designation is based on the scant evidence available for the Piscataway language. The Doeg tribe, then located in present-day Northern Virginia, are also thought to have spoken a form of the same language. These dialects were intermediate between the Native American groups of Lenape languages formerly spoken to the north of this area (in present-day Delaware and New Jersey) and the Powhatan language, formerly spoken to the south, in what is now Tidewater Virginia.
There are 88 individual languages of Ethiopia according to Ethnologue, with the 1994 Ethiopian census indicating that some 77 tongues were spoken locally. Most of these languages belong to the Afroasiatic family (Semitic and Cushitic languages; Omotic languages are also spoken, though their classification is uncertain). Additionally, Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by what the government calls the "Nilotic" people, though scholars distinguish Nilotic from the Surmic languages, Gumuz languages, and Koman languages and spoken in Ethiopia.
There is essentially no disagreement that the standard form of the official language in Moldova is identical to standard Romanian. The spoken language of Moldova, in spite of small regional differences, is completely understandable to speakers from Romania and vice versa. The slight differences are in pronunciation and the choice of vocabulary. For example, cabbage, drill and water melon are respectively "curechi", "sfredel" and "harbuz" in both the Republic of Moldova and the Romanian part of Moldavia, but their synonyms "varză", "burghiu" and "pepene" are preferred in Wallachia.
The list of Bulgarian language poets includes those literary figures who are notable for their poetry written in the native tongue of Bulgaria. This language is also spoken in parts of Ukraine, Moldova, Turkey, Greece, Romania, and Serbia.
The Ivatan language is basically a spoken language. Until lately, little effort was made to record the language in written form. What the young generation know about it is largely through hearing it spoken and speaking it.