Vlach language (Serbia)

In the context of Serbia, Vlach (rumînjeašće/vlaški^[1]) is the Daco-Romanian language, as spoken by the Vlachs of Serbia. (Serbian Aromanian, on the other hand, is known as Vlas.) Serbian Vlach consists of two main dialects.

Status

Serbian statistics list Vlach as minority language in Serbia and it's recognized by the Serbian Law. In the 2002 census, 35,339^[2] people in Serbia declared themselves ethnic Vlachs and 54,818 people declared themselves native speakers of the Vlach language.

The Vlach language have official status, but it is not standardized.

Serbian Vlachs, as well as Aromanians are old Balkan nationalities that basically speak a Latin language or dialect. It varies from region to region because of geographical distance. They are the remnants of the interchange between the Greek and Latin worlds.

Features

Its two main variants, Ungurjan and Caran, are close to some Wallachian dialects with strong influence from Serbian. But to a well trained Vlach, even Vlahika in Greece is easily understood. They write out the spoken language in Greek, so if one knows the Greek alphabet one can easily decipher what is being said.

Their language was isolated from Romanian (actually, the base of the Romanian language is Vlach. Romanians only further Latinized it, Vlachs kept the language pure and simple. Romanian came years and centuries after the "Balkan" Vlach language. Luckily, it did not keep up with the neologisms (for some abstract notions, as well as technological, political and scientific concepts) borrowed from French and Italian, which Romanians have done.

Name

The term "Vlach" is the English transcription of the Serbian term used to describe this language (vlaški).

The term Vlach language(s) is also often used to refer to Eastern Romance languages in general, which includes Romanian. There are little differences between these Vlach languages (the Greek, Macedonian and Albanian Vlachs, versus the Vlachs of Istria, versus the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia) and native speakers do not have trouble understanding each other. Some regional media use Vlach language in their programes.

References