On 19 December 2003, the Parliament passed a Law of Nationalities, which made a controversial distinction between a Moldovan majority and a Romanian minority (a historically, ethnically, and linguistically contentious distinction). In the 2004 population census, first since independence, of the 2,638,125 Moldovans and Romanians (78.3% of the country's population), 2,564,850 (97.2%) were registered as Moldovans and 73,276 (2.8%) as Romanians (94.9%, resp. 5.1% in urban areas, and 98.4%, resp. 1.6% in rural areas). 2,012,542 or 76.3% of them called native language Moldovan (58.9% in urban areas and 84.8% in rural ones), and 552,920 or 21.0% of them called it Romanian (34.3% in urban areas and 14.4% in rural ones).
