This book is unique in its kind. It is the first scholarly work to attempt a comprehensive and fairly detailed look into the lingering legacies of the communist totalitarian modes of thought and expression in the new discourse forms of the post-totalitarian era. The book gives also new and interesting insights into the ways the new, presumably democratically-minded political elites in post-totalitarian Eastern Europe, Russia, and China manipulate language to serve their own political and economic agendas. The book consists of ten discrete discussions, nine case-studies or chapters and an introduction. Chapter 1 discusses patterns of continuity and change in the conceptual apparatus and linguistic habits of political science and sociology practiced in the Czech Republic before and after 1989. Chapter 2 analyzes lingering effects of communist propaganda language in the political discourse and behavior in post-communist Poland. Chapter 3 analyzes the legacy of Soviet semantics in post-Soviet Moldovan politics through the prism of such politically contested words as "democracy," "democratization," and "people." Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the way in which communist patterns of thought and expression manifest themselves in the new political discourse in Romania and Bulgaria, respectively. Chapter 6 examines phenomena of change and continuity in the socio-linguistic and socio-political scene of post-Soviet Latvia. Chapter 7 analyzes the extent to which the language of the post-communist Romanian media differs from the official language of the communist era. Chapter 8 examines the evolution of Russian official discourse since the late eighties with a view of showing "whether or not new phenomena in the evolution of post-Soviet discourse represent new development or just a mutation of the value-orientations of the old Soviet ideological apparatus." Chapter 9 gives a detailed and lucid account of the evolution of both official and non-official discourse in China since the end of the Mao era.

Who are the Moldovans? The Language of the Moldovans explores this question from the perspective of debates about the languages spoken by the people of this ex-Soviet state. Locating language as a central point of both cohesion and conflict in the region's recent history, the peculiarities of the Moldovans are illustrated by a survey of language attitudes, a series of ethnographic interviews, and extensive observations by the author. The result is an image of an emerging nation that is, at once, similar to the experiences of other ex-Soviet states and uniquely complex. Much of that complexity lies in the population's extensive multilingualism and in uncertainty about the Romanian-ness of the official language. This cross-discipline volume is of great interest to advanced students and researchers of linguistics, political science, and Eastern European studies.