Macedoromanian language

Aromanian (also known as Macedoromanian; in Aromanian: Armâneashti or Vlăheşte) is a language in the eastern group of the Romance languages. It is considered to be either a Romanian dialect or a separate language.

Aromanian (armâneashti)
Spoken	Greece, Albania, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia
Region	Eastern Europe
Total speakers	aprox. 500,000
Ranking	Not in top 100
Dialects	1
Genetic classification	Indo-European  Italic   Romance    East Romance     Aromanian
Official status
Official language	none
Regulated by	none
Language codes
ISO 639-1	none
ISO 639-2	none
SIL	RUP

The language is similar to Romanian, but it does exhibit some differences, especially in vocabulary. Aromanian is spoken by the Aromanian or Vlach minority in the Republic of Macedonia, but also in parts of Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece.

Greek and Bulgarian influences are much stronger than in other East Romance languages, especially because Aromanian used Greek words to coin new words (neologisms), while Romanian based most of its neologisms on Italian and French.

Still the lexical composition remains mainly Romance. Just as in Romanian, the morphology is rather different from other descendants of Latin. For example, the article is appended to the end of the word, and both definite and indefinite articles can be declined. Nouns have common (or neuter) gender in addition to masculine and feminine genders. On the other hand, the sequence of tenses is absolutely absent.

It is generally considered that Aromanian dialects split from the main Romanian language around 1200 years ago. It contains the same common words with Albanian as Romanian (believed to be of Dacian) and 70 early Slavic borrowings, but no Hungarian language words.

See also: Romanian language, Romance languages