` ::::::::::Feel free to ask Xasha if that's indeed his view  I doubt it is, given his explanations above. Maybe you missed the part in Xasha's analysis above where Moldovans in Romania were treated like dirt and had to learn the Romanian language like any minority; the part where they would have wanted to express themselves in their own language but were forced by the powers that be in Romania to use Romanian instead; the part where the history of the Moldovan language starting in 1924 is original research; the part where he refuses point blank to address the issue of whether the chroniclers meant a separate language or the same one, insisting we should allow the reader to form an opinion based on carefully chosen quotations; the part where Romanian and Moldovan only had in common a similar grammar and some basic words; and so on, and so on. It is painfully obvious to me that this article, in the form preferred by Xasha (I suppose this version would qualify), is a transparent attempt at making a case for a stand-alone Moldovan language presumably being traced back to the 17th century (and why not, even earlier, as the article was hinting). ::::::::::Now, to answer your larger question. We need to decide what this article is about. You cannot have an article about the early history of the Moldovan variety of Romanian (I will use ``variety`` in favor of ``dialect`` and ``speech``) without the context of all the other varieties of Romanian  they all evolved together, as variations of one single language, because none of the varieties were isolated enough to give birth to a dialect proper, let alone a stand-alone language. One cannot even compare Moldovan and Romanian to British English and American English  these two varieties have been isolated, they have evolved in different cultures, with different writers and ethnic groups significantly influencing each. In Romania and Moldova (and Banat, and Transylvania, and Oltenia, and Wallachia) that never happened for any significant periods of time, mostly because of the regions' proximity. Throughout the history of the territory of the historical principalities there was a continuous cultural exchange, within the context of a uniform ethnic group  people were constantly moving from one Principality to the next, depending on where life was better; literature, poetry and ideas as well  and even the chronicles written in one Principality were being read throughout the region; Cantemir himself started writing a chronicle about all Romanians in all principalities, in a period when the idea of a nation state hadn't yet been invented, that's how close all of Romanians felt about each others. ::::::::::So, if you cannot do that, you have to move the relevant sections where they belong, namely in History of the Romanian language, where the evolution of the language can be properly analysed in a coherent fashion. That leaves this article with the current form (actually, I'm of the opinion that everything before 1924 should be merged with Romanian, given that that's when the ``Moldovan language`` proper was actually born  which you seem to agree with).   T+ `