Vlach

Vlach, any of a group of Romance-language speakers who live south of the Danube in what are now southern Albania, northern Greece, the Republic of Macedonia, and southwestern Bulgaria. Vlach is the English-language term used to describe such an individual. The majority of Vlachs speak Aromanian, but inhabitants of a few villages on both sides of the border between Greece and southeastern Macedonia speak Meglenoromanian and call themselves Vla (plural Vlaš). There is also a Vlach diaspora in other European countries, especially Romania, as well as in North America and Australia.

Estimates of the number of Vlachs and of Aromanian speakers vary widely. The only official figures for those declaring Vlach ethnic affiliation come from the Republic of Macedonia (2002), 9,695, with 6,884 declaring Vlach their mother tongue; Albania (2011), 8,266, with 3,848 claiming Aromanian as their mother tongue; and Bulgaria (2011), 3,684 ethnic Vlachs. Estimates for Romania vary between 30,000 and 100,000. Estimates for Greece vary even more.

Etymology of the term Vlach

The name Vlach comes from a Celtic tribal name recorded by Caesar as Volcae and by Strabo and Ptolemy as Ouólkai, and it was transferred from Latin to Gothic as *walhs. In Gothic, from which it entered Slavic, the ethnonym took on the meaning “foreigner” or “Latin speaker.” The form Vlach reflects South Slavic metathesis, while the name of the former Romanian kingdom of Walachia reflects East Slavic treatment.

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Greece: The Aromani (Aromanians)

In Serbia the term Vlach (Serbian Vlah, plural Vlasi) is also used to refer to Romanian speakers, especially those living in eastern Serbia. Formerly, the term was used for any Romanian speaker. The term Cincar (plural Cincari) is used in Serbia for Aromanians. That term is not favoured by Aromanians, but some in Serbia use it to distinguish themselves from Romanians. It has its origins as a nickname based on the Aromanian pronunciation of the word for “five”—tsints—as opposed to the Romanian word cinci (pronounced “chinchi”). In Greece the term Kutsovlach (“lame Vlach”) is sometimes used, but many find it offensive.

Aromanians themselves use the ethnonym Armãn (plural Armãni) or Rãmãn (plural Rãmãni), etymologically from Romanus, meaning “Roman.” Meglenoromanians designate themselves with the Macedonian form Vla (plural Vlaš) in their own language. In the modern Aromanian orthography used in the Republic of Macedonia, the only country where Aromanian has official status (it is one of the officially recognized minority languages), a tilde (~) is used to indicate schwa (i.e., ã), rather than the breve (ă) of Romanian. In the 21st century both Aromanian and Meglenoromanian were severely endangered languages.

The question of Vlach origins and how that affects their status

Although the origin of Aromanian and Meglenoromanian (and Romanian) from Balkan Latin is beyond question, it is unclear to what extent contemporary Balkan Romance speakers are descended from Roman colonists or from indigenous pre-Roman Balkan populations who shifted to Latin. The question itself is of historical interest, but the potential answers are deployed politically. The term Vlach first occurs in late medieval sources, but scholars cannot be certain whether it is used consistently to refer to Romance speakers or not. There is a thousand-year gap in textual attestations of Romance in the Balkans (from the 6th to the 16th centuries ce). It is therefore not known if speakers of Balkan Latin all left Dacia at the end of the Roman occupation (107–271 ce) and then migrated northward after the Magyar invasions at the turn of the millennium, or whether Romanized Dacians remained north of the Danube and survived waves of subsequent invasion, presumably in the mountains, before expanding. Moreover, since Aromanian and Meglenoromanian are spoken south of the Jireček line—i.e., in the region where Greek rather than Latin was the language of inscriptions—there is a question concerning whether those speakers are Romanized autochthonous populations or peoples who migrated to the current locations during the Middle Ages. There is an additional question of whether Meglenoromanian branched off from Aromanian or Romanian.

Nationalist historians deploy one or the other scenario to justify modern territorial claims or claims to indigeneity. Thus, Hungarian (Magyar) claims to Transylvania assume a complete Roman exodus from Dacia, while Romanian claims assume that Romance continued to be spoken by Romanized Dacians. Most scholars who are not nationally affiliated assume the second scenario. As for the Aromanians, it is entirely reasonable to argue that Roman roads in the southern Balkans were lined with Roman guard posts, thus providing a source of spoken Latin in a region where Greek remained the language of inscriptions. That claim is supported by the observation that written language did not necessarily correspond to spoken language in most of the Balkans in ancient times. Those Romans and Romanized indigenous peoples living in regions where Greek was the dominant prestige language became pastoralists or town dwellers during the Slavic invasions of the 6th and 7th centuries, if they were not already in one or the other social class at the time of those invasions.

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Linguists generally accept a combination of linguistic and historical reconstruction that postulates a unified East Balkan Romance language area both north and south of the Danube that was broken up sometime between the Slavic invasions (6th–7th century) and the first textual references to Vlachs in Byzantine sources (11th century). Moreover, the evidence of shared innovations in Aromanian and Meglenoromanian indicate that the latter branched off from the former, rather than from Romanian. Some Romanian linguists recognize Aromanian as a separate Balkan Romance language, whereas others consider it a dialect of Romanian despite the many differences and the separation of a millennium or more. For example, Aromanian differs from Romanian in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. Some dialects have phonemes not found in Romanian, and others have eliminated older Common East Balkan Romance changes that are preserved in Romanian. The overall syntax and lexicon of Aromanian are closer to Albanian, Greek, and Macedonian than those of Romanian, which in those respects patterns more with Bulgarian. Aromanian has also preserved a much higher proportion of vocabulary of Turkish origin than has Romanian. Aromanian is used and codified as a distinct language in the Republic of Macedonia and in Albania. The Ottoman Empire recognized Vlach as a distinct millet (“nation”; i.e., as a distinct church) on May 23, 1905 (May 10, Old Style); May 23 is treated in Macedonia as the Aromanian national holiday. In Greece the Vlachs, like other Christian minorities, have no language rights. Books of Vlach folklore and linguistic studies have, however, been published there, and occasional folklore performances are permitted.