Eastern Romance languages

The Eastern Romance languages, in their narrow conception, sometimes known as the Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe from the local variant of Vulgar Latin. Some classifications include the Italo-Dalmatian languages; when Italian is classified as Western Romance, Dalmatian generally remains in Eastern. This article is concerned with Eastern Romance in the narrow sense, without Italian.

History

An asymmetrical merger of Latin vowels, with /i/ merging with /ē/ and /e/ but /u/ merging with /ū/, sets off Eastern Romance from the symmetrical merger of /u/ with /ō/ and /o/ found in Western Romance. However, while this persists today in only a few isolated dialects in western Basilicata, such as Castelmezzano dialect, as well as Dalmatian and the Romanian languages, there is evidence that it once occurred throughout southern Italy.

Several hundred years after the Roman Empire's dominance of the region, the local form of Vulgar Latin developed into Proto-Romanian, a language which had most of the features of modern Romanian. Probably due to foreign invasions (see Romania in the Dark Ages) Proto-Romanian split into four separate languages: