Eastern Romance languages

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Map of Balkans with regions inhabited by Romanians/Vlachs highlighted

The Eastern Romance languages, sometimes known as the Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe from the local eastern variant of Vulgar Latin.

1 History
2 Common features
3 Languages
4 See also

[edit] History

From Vulgar Latin, several hundreds of years afterward, a language called Proto-Romanian was developed, which had already most of the features of modern Romanian. It is generally considered that sometime between 800 and 1,200 years ago, due to the foreign invasions (see Romania in the Dark Ages) and the migration of Vlach shepherds (see Vlachs#Wallachia), Proto-Romanian split into four separate languages: Daco-Romanian (today's Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian.

In addition, in the Soviet Union the Moldovan language was officially introduced, to draw a distinction between the Romanian and Moldovan nations, an attempt that had eventually failed.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Common features

Main article: Proto-Romanian

Eastern Romance languages
Proto-Romanian language
Substratum

Daco-Romanian (Romanian, Moldovan, Vlach) Grammar \| Nouns \| Verbs Numerals \| Phonology \| Lexis
Regulating bodies Romanian Academy Academy of Sciences of Moldova

Aromanian

Megleno-Romanian

Istro-Romanian
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This group was one of the earliest to be isolated. As such, they contain a few words which were replaced with Germanic borrowings in Western Romance languages, for example, the word for white is derived from Latin "albus" instead of Germanic "blank".

They also share a few sound changes with the western Romance languages: some with Italian, such as [kl] > [kj] (Lat. clarus > Rom. chiar, Ital. chiaro) and also a few with Dalmatian, such as [gn] > [mn] (Lat. cognatus > Rom. cumnat, Dalm. comnut). However, most of them are original, see: Latin to Romanian sound changes.

The languages that are part of this group have some features that differentiate them from the other Romance languages, notable being the grammatical features shared within the Balkan linguistic union as well as some semantic peculiarities, such as lume ("world") being derived from Latin lumen ("light"), inimă ("heart") being derived from Latin anima ("soul"), etc.

They also contain a Paleo-Balkanic substrate of a few hundreds of words, shared with Albanian (considered to be of Dacian origin) and 70 early Slavic borrowings, but the Hungarian language words are found only in Romanian and Istro-Romanian.