[mo/mol] and [ro/ron/rum]

[Peter Constable]

ISO 639 has separate entries for Moldavian (alpha2 = mo) and Romanian (alpha2 = ro). Moldavian was an artificially-constructed distinction created by the Soviet-backed administrations – an attempt at language engineering that failed. This included introduction of Cyrillic script in Moldova, but that country has reverted to use of Latin script. Every indication I have seen is that there is no language distinction between Moldavian and Romanian.   The question on which I’d like feedback is this: if the identifiers for Moldavian in ISO 639 were to be deprecated, would there be any negative impact on IT applications?   To fill in the details, the deprecated IDs would not be removed from the standard or made available for re-assignment; it would be like deprecation of a character in Unicode: it’s still there with the same semantics, but the best-practice recommendation is not to generate it.       Peter   Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division