Etymology of Vlach

The origin of the name is Germanic: it was used with the form "Walha" by the ancient Germans to call their Celtic neighbours, possibly derived from the name of the tribe which was known to the Romans as Volcae (in the writtings of Julius Caesar) and to the Greeks as "Ouólkai" (Strabo and Ptolemy). This usage is still kept in English in the word Welsh. The origin of this tribe name's appears to be the same as the one of Germanic "Volk" and English "Folk".

As the Celts of Gaul were Romanized, the word changed its meaning to "Romanic people", as it is still kept in the name of the Walloons of Belgium.

This word for Romanic people was borrowed from the Germanic Goths (as *walhs) by the Slavs. Later on, the meaning of this noun in Slavic languages got narrower or just different:

From the Slavs, it was passed on to other peoples, such as the Hungarians ("Olah") and Greeks ("Vlachoi") and was used for all Latin people of the Balkans. It also acquired a second meaning: "shepherd", after the occupation of many Vlachs of Greece and Serbia. In Albania, the opposite occurred: çoban "shepherd" comes to mean "Vlach".

The term was originally an , as the Vlachs used various words derived from romanus to refer to themselves (români, rumâni, rumâri, aromâni, arumâni etc).

Historically, it was used to refer to all Latin people of the Balkans, but nowadays, this term is only rarely used to refer the Romanians, but rather to refer to the Aromanians, Istro-Romanians and Megleno-Romanians.

However, in Serbia, the Romanian minority (living especially in Vojvodina, Timok valley), although they are speaking the Daco-Romanian (standard Romanian) dialect, they are still referred as "Vlachs". In the Yugoslavian census figures, the Aromanians of Macedonia and the Romanians of Serbia were both classified as "Vlachs".

A name used for the Southern Vlachs of Greece is "Kutsovlach" (literally "limping Vlach"), however the Aromanians consider it quite offensive. Another name used to refer to the Aromanians (mainly in the Slavic countries: Serbia and Bulgaria) is 'tsintsar', which is derived from the way the Aromanians say the word 'five': "tsintsi".

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