Moldavian and Romanian

On December 5, 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Moldova ruled that the country’s official language is Romanian (Moldova: Romanian Recognized as the Official Language). This change has affected the treatment of the language in bibliographic records.

A distinction is no longer made in the language codes for Romanian (and formerly Moldavian) written in the Cyrillic script and Romanian written in the Latin script. The language code for this language is now rum (Romanian), regardless of the script. Information about the script, especially if the script is Cyrillic, can still be noted in the 546 language note as the script of the text is generally important to users.

Example (in MARC format):

546 Romanian; ‡b Cyrillic.

The code mol, formerly used for Moldavian written in the Cyrillic script, has been marked in the MARC Code List for Languages as -mol, indicating that this code should no longer be used (http://www.loc.gov/marc/languages/language_code.html)

Note: Please be careful to use the correct code rum (based on the older English spelling “Rumanian”) and not rom, which is the language code for Romani.

A proposal for new Romanian (in Cyrillic) romanization table was recently received, reviewed and approved by the ALCTS Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA). The table can be found here: Romanization table of Romanian in Cyrillic Script.