Eastern Romance languages in the context of "Aromanian language"

Vlach (/vlɑːk, vlæk/ VLA(H)K), also Wallachian and many other variants, is a term and exonym used from the Middle Ages until the Modern Era to designate speakers of Eastern Romance languages living in Southeast Europe—south of the Danube (the Balkan peninsula) and north of the Danube.

Although it has also been used to name present-day Romanians, the term "Vlach" today refers primarily to speakers of the Eastern Romance languages who live south of the Danube, in Albania, Bulgaria, northern Greece, North Macedonia and eastern Serbia. These people include the ethnic groups of the Aromanians, the Megleno-Romanians and, in Serbia, the Timok Romanians. The term also became a synonym in the Balkans for the social category of shepherds, and was also used for non-Romance-speaking peoples, in recent times in the western Balkans derogatively. The term is also used to refer to the ethnographic group of Moravian Vlachs who speak a Slavic language but originate from Romanians, as well as for Morlachs and Istro-Romanians.

Romanian (obsolete spelling: Roumanian; endonym: limba română [ˈlimba roˈmɨnə] , or românește [romɨˈneʃte], lit. 'in Romanian') is the official and main language of Romania and Moldova. Romanian is part of the Eastern Romance sub-branch of Romance languages, a linguistic group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin which separated from the Western Romance languages in the course of the period from the 5th to the 8th centuries. To distinguish it within the Eastern Romance languages, in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. It is also spoken as a minority language by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania (Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia and Ukraine), and by the large Romanian diaspora. In total, it is spoken by 25 million people as a first language.

Romanian was also known as Moldovan in Moldova, although the Constitutional Court of Moldova ruled in 2013 that "the official language of Moldova is Romanian". On 16 March 2023, the Moldovan Parliament approved a law on referring to the national language as Romanian in all legislative texts and the constitution. On 22 March, the president of Moldova, Maia Sandu, promulgated the law.

Albanoid or Albanic is a proposed branch or subfamily of the Indo-European (IE) languages, of which Albanian language varieties are the only surviving representatives. In current classifications of the IE language family, Albanian is grouped in the same IE branch with Messapic, an ancient extinct language of Balkan provenance that is preserved in about six hundred inscriptions from Iron Age Apulia. This IE subfamily is alternatively referred to as Illyric, Illyrian complex, Western Paleo-Balkan, or Adriatic Indo-European. Concerning "Illyrian" of classical antiquity, it is not clear whether the scantly documented evidence actually represents one language and not material from several languages, but if "Illyrian" is defined as the ancient precursor of Albanian or the sibling of Proto-Albanian it is automatically included in this IE branch. Albanoid is also used to explain Albanian-like pre-Romance features found in Eastern Romance languages.

The relation between Albanian and Messapic is supported by available fragmentary linguistic evidence that shows common characteristic innovations and a number of significant lexical correspondences between the two languages, and notably within the centum-satem classification they both feature the (partial) retention of the Proto-Indo-European three-way contrast for dorsal stops, which is limited only to them among the historical languages of the Balkans and Adriatic Sea (a similar feature is also evident in Luwian of the Anatolian languages and in Armenian). Proto-Messapic migration from the opposite Adriatic coast through a trans-Adriatic interaction network is also confirmed by recent archaeological evidence dating to the period between 1700 BCE and 1400 BCE, in the post-Cetina horizon.

Megleno-Romanian (known as vlăhește by its speakers, and Megleno-Romanian or Meglenitic and sometimes Moglenitic or Meglinitic by linguists) is an Eastern Romance language, similar to Aromanian. It is spoken by the Megleno-Romanians in a few villages in the Moglena region that spans the border between the Greek region of Macedonia and North Macedonia. It is also spoken by emigrants from these villages and their descendants in Romania, in Turkey by a small Muslim group, and in Serbia. It is considered an endangered language.

The Istro-Romanian language (rumârește, vlășește) is an Eastern Romance language, spoken in a few villages and hamlets in the peninsula of Istria in Croatia, as well as in the diaspora of this people. It is sometimes abbreviated to IR.

While its speakers call themselves Rumeri, Rumeni, they are also known as Vlachs, Rumunski, Ćići and Ćiribiri. The last one, used by ethnic Croats, originated as a disparaging nickname for the language, rather than its speakers.

Italo-Western is, in some classifications, the largest branch of the Romance languages. It comprises two of the branches of Romance languages: Italo-Dalmatian and Western Romance. It excludes the Sardinian language and Eastern Romance.

In the linguistics of the Romance languages, the La Spezia–Rimini Line, also known as the Massa–Senigallia Line, is a line that demarcates a number of important isoglosses that distinguish Romance languages south and east of the line from Romance languages north and west of it. The line divides northern and central Italy, running approximately between the cities of La Spezia and Rimini (or, according to some linguists, between Massa and Senigallia, which lie about 40 kilometres further to the south). Romance languages south and east of it include Italian and the Eastern Romance languages (Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian), whereas Catalan, French, Occitan, Portuguese, Romansh, Spanish, and the Gallo‒Italic languages are representatives of the Western group. In this classification, the Sardinian language is not part of either Western or Eastern Romance.

It has been suggested that the origin of these developments is to be found during the last decades of the Western Roman Empire and the Ostrogothic Kingdom (c. 395–535 AD). During this period, the area of Italy north of the line was dominated by an increasingly Germanic Roman army of (northern) Italy, followed by the Ostrogoths; the Roman Senate and Papacy became the dominant social elements south of the line. As for the provinces outside Italy, the social influences in Gaul and Iberia were broadly similar to those in northern Italy, whereas the Balkans were dominated by the Byzantine Empire at this time (and later, by Slavic peoples). In either case, it coincides approximately with the northern range of the Apennine Mountains, which could have helped the development of these linguistic differences.