The Aromanians' name for themselves comes straight from the Latin word for Roman
Scattered across Greece, Albania, North Macedonia and Bulgaria, the Aromanians speak a Romance language close to Romanian, a living echo of the Latin once spoken in the Balkans. Their own name, Armãn or Rrãmãn, descends from Romanus. Neighbours have long called them Vlachs, a word that has meant shepherd, bandit and more.
Aromanian grew out of Common Romanian, the shared ancestor of the Eastern Romance tongues, which itself developed from the Vulgar Latin adopted by Balkan peoples under Rome. It has borrowed heavily from Greek, Slavic and Turkish and shares features with Albanian and Bulgarian, yet most of its vocabulary is still Romance. The initial a- of the name is simply a vowel inserted before certain consonant clusters, not the Greek negative prefix of folk etymology. The linguist Gustav Weigand coined the English-style term in his 1894 book Die Aromunen.
Outsiders have many labels. Vlach was a medieval catch-all for Romance speakers and herders; in Ottoman writing it could mean bandit or rebel. Greeks sometimes say Koutsovlachs, which some hear as an insult because koutso- can mean lame. South Slavs use Tsintsari, mimicking the Aromanian word for five, tsintsi, and Albanians use a term from the Turkish for shepherd. The scholar Thede Kahl sorts the people into two main branches, the Armãnji and the Rrãmãnji.
Their early history has a gap. Vlachs first surface in 11th-century Byzantine texts, including Anna Komnene's Alexiad, in Thessaly, and in the 12th century Benjamin of Tudela noted a district called Vlachia near Halmyros. Whether they descend from Roman soldiers or from Latinised Greeks, Illyrians, Thracians or Dacians is debated; a 2006 genetic study found them indistinguishable from neighbouring Balkan populations.
Under the Ottomans, Orthodox Aromanians were grouped with Greeks in the Rum millet, and wealthy town-dwellers became culturally Greek; the first book in Aromanian used the Greek alphabet to teach Greek. A separate identity took shape only in the 19th century. In 1815 the Aromanians of Budapest asked to hold services in their own language and were refused. The community in Albania is estimated at up to 200,000, with Moscopole, once a major Balkan town, as its most famous settlement.
Source: Aromanians
