Aromanians

The Aromanians are an ethnic group native to the southern Balkans who speak Aromanian, an Eastern Romance language. They traditionally live in central and southern Albania, south-western Bulgaria, northern and central Greece, and North Macedonia, and can currently be found also in southern Serbia, and south-eastern Romania. An Aromanian diaspora living outside these places also exists. The Aromanians are known by several other names, such as "Vlachs" or "Macedo-Romanians".
The term "Vlachs" is used in Greece and in other countries to refer to the Aromanians, with this term having been more widespread in the past to refer to all Romance-speaking peoples of the Balkan Peninsula and Carpathian Mountains region.
Their vernacular, Aromanian, is an Eastern Romance language very similar to Romanian, which has many slightly varying dialects of its own. Aromanian is considered to have developed from Common Romanian, a common stage of all the Eastern Romance varieties that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken by Paleo-Balkan peoples after the Romanization of the Balkan area that fell under the Latin sphere of influence. The Aromanian language shares many common features with Albanian, Bulgarian and Greek; however, although it has many loanwords from Greek, Slavic, and Turkish, its lexicon remains majority Romance in origin.

Names and classification

Ethnonyms

The term Aromanian derives directly from the Latin Romanus, meaning Roman citizen. The initial a- is a regular epenthetic vowel, occurring when certain consonant clusters are formed, and it is not, as folk etymology sometimes has it, related to the negative or privative a- of Greek. The term was coined by Gustav Weigand in his 1894 work Die Aromunen. The first book to which many scholars have referred to as the most valuable to translate their ethnic name is a grammar printed in 1813 in Vienna by Mihail G. Boiagi. It was titled Γραμματική Ρωμαϊκή ήτοι Μακεδονοβλαχική/Romanische oder Macedonowlachische Sprachlehre.
The term Vlach is an exonym used since medieval times. Aromanians call themselves Rrãmãn or Armãn, depending on which of the two dialectal groups they belong, and identify as part of the Fara Armãneascã or the Populu Armãnescu. The endonym is rendered in English as Aromanian, in Romanian as Aromâni, in Greek as Armanoi, in Albanian as Arumunët, in Bulgarian as Arumani, in Macedonian as Aromanci, in Serbo-Croatian as Armani and Aromuni.
The term "Vlach" was used in medieval Balkans as an exonym for all the Romance-speaking people of the region, as well as a general name for shepherds, but nowadays is commonly used for the Aromanians and Meglenites, Daco-Romanians being named Vlachs only in Serbia, Bulgaria and North Macedonia. The term is noted in the following languages: Greek "Vlachoi", Albanian "Vllehët", Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian "Vlasi", Turkish "Ulahlar", Hungarian "Oláh". It is noteworthy that the term Vlach also meant "bandit" or "rebel" in Ottoman historiography, and that the term was also used as an exonym for mainly Orthodox Christians in Ottoman-ruled western Balkans, as well as by the Venetians for the immigrant Slavophone population of the Dalmatian hinterland.

Groups

German academic Thede Kahl, expert on Aromanian studies, divides the Aromanians into two main groups, the "Rrãmãnji" and "Armãnji", which are further divided into sub-groups.
Rrãmãnji

Muzãchiars, from Muzachia situated in southwestern-central Albania.
Fãrshãrots, mostly concentrated in Epirus, from the Frashër area in south-eastern Albania.
Moscopolitans or Moscopoleans, from the city of Moscopole, once an important urban center of the Balkans, now a village in southeastern Albania.

Armãnji

Pindeans, concentrated in and around the Pindus Mountains of Northern and Central Greece.
Gramustians, from Gramos Mountains, an isolated area in south-eastern Albania, and north-west of Greece.
Nicknames

The Aromanian communities have several nicknames depending on the country where they are living.

Gramustians and Pindians are nicknamed Koutsovlachs. This term is sometimes taken as derogatory, as the first element of this term is from the Greek koutso- meaning "lame". Following a Turkish etymology where küçük means "little" they are the smaller group of Vlachs as opposed to the more numerous Vlachs.
Fãrsherots, from Frashër, Moscopole and Muzachia are nicknamed "Frasariotes" or Arvanitovlachs, meaning "Albanian Vlachs" referring to their place of origin.

In the South Slavic countries, such as Serbia, North Macedonia and Bulgaria, the nicknames used to refer to the Aromanians are usually Vlasi and Tsintsari, which is derived from the way the Aromanians pronounce the word meaning five, tsintsi. In Romania, the demonym Macedoni, Machedoni or Macedoromâni is also used. In Albania, the terms Vllah or Vlleh and Çoban or Çobenj are used.

Population

Settlements

The Aromanian community in Albania is estimated up to 200,000 people, including those who no longer speak the language. Tanner estimates that the community constitutes 2% of the population. In Albania, Aromanian communities inhabit Moscopole, their most famous settlement, the Kolonjë District, a quarter of Fier, while Aromanian was taught, as recorded by Tom Winnifrith, at primary schools in Andon Poçi near Gjirokastër, Shkallë near Sarandë, and Borovë near Korçë .
A Romanian research team concluded in the 1960s that Albanian Aromanians migrated to Tirana, Stan Karbunarë, Skrapar, Pojan, Bilisht and Korçë, and that they inhabited Karaja, Lushnjë, Moscopole, Drenovë and Boboshticë.

Origins

Language

The Aromanian language is related to the Vulgar Latin spoken in the Balkans during the Roman period. It is hard to establish the history of the Vlachs in the Balkans, with a gap between the barbarian invasions and the first mentions of the Vlachs in the 11th and 12th centuries. Byzantine chronicles are unhelpful, and only in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries does the term Vlach become more frequent, although it proves problematic to distinguish sorts of Vlachs as it was used for various subjects, such as the empire of the Asen dynasty, Thessaly, and Romania across the Danube. It has been assumed that Vlachs are descendants of Roman soldiers or Latinized original populations, due to the historical Roman military presence in the territory inhabited by the community. According to David Binder, the Greek connection is the strongest. Many Romanian scholars maintain that the Aromanians were part of a Daco-Romanian migration from the north of the Danube between the 6th and 10th centuries, supporting the theory that the 'Great Romanian' population descend from the ancient Dacians and Romans. Greek scholars view the Aromanians as descendants of Roman legionaries that married Greek women. There is no evidence for either theory, and Winnifrith deems them improbable. The little evidence that exists points that the Vlach homeland was within the Latin sphere of influence in the Northern Balkans, north of the Jireček Line, which roughly demarcated the areas of influence of Latin and Greek. With the Slavic breakthrough of the Danube frontier in the 7th century, Latin-speakers were pushed further southwards. Based on linguistic considerations, Olga Tomic concludes that Aromanians moved from Thrace to their present locations after the Slavic invasion of Thrace, though before the Megleno-Romanians.

Genetic studies

In 2006 Bosch et al. attempted to determine if the Aromanians are descendants of Latinised Dacians, Greeks, Illyrians, Thracians or a combination of these, but it was shown that they are genetically indistinguishable from the other Balkan populations. Linguistic and cultural differences between Balkan groups were deemed too weak to prevent gene flow among the groups.
;Y-DNA haplogroups

Sample population	Sample size	R1b	R1a	I	E1b1b	E1b1a	J	G	N	T	L	Other
Aromanians from Dukas, Albania	39											-
Aromanians from Andon Poçi, Albania	19											-
Aromanians from Kruševo, North Macedonia	43											-
Aromanians from Štip, North Macedonia	65											-
Aromanians in Romania	42								—	—	—	– 14.29%
Aromanians in Balkan Peninsula	39+ 19+ 43+ 65+ 42= 208								—	—	—	– 2.88%

Haplogroup R1b is the most common haplogroup among two or three of the five tested Aromanian populations, which is not shown as a leading mark of the Y-DNA locus in other regions or ethnic groups on the Balkan Peninsula. On the 16 Y-STR markers from the five Aromanian populations, Jim Cullen's predictor speculates that over half of the mean frequency of 22% R1b of the Aromanian populations is more likely to belong to the L11 branch. L11 subclades form the majority of Haplogroup R1b in Italy and western Europe, while the eastern subclades of R1b are prevailing in populations of the eastern Balkans.