Aromanian Cultural and Linguistic Shift to Greek

Abstract

Aromanian-armân, (Weigand, 1895) is an oral Eastern-Romance language spoken by the Aromanians (armâni, or armãneashti), an ethnic group historically known for transhumance, dispersed over a wide area of the Balkans in what is present-day Peninsular Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Southern Romania, Serbia, and Albania. These people have been noted as Aromanians or Vlachs sometime since the eighth century AD. (Caranica, 1990). Their ethnicity (Eriksen, 2010) is controversial with Greeks believing them Latinised Greeks, Romanians considering them Romanian, others as Balkan natives from Wallachia (Ruzica, 2006). In Greek, the current word for Aromanian is in fact ‘Vlach’ believed to originate from the Latin terms Volcae, Volci (Volks, Wolks) referring to a Celtic tribe from Gaul that had learnt Latin and become Latinized. The Volks-Wolks were the closest neighbors to Germanic tribes in the area, which resulted in Germans referring to all Latin speakers as ‘Volks,’ the same way they did with their language. For clarification, in this study: Aromanian, Vlach (-) Aromanian and Vlach will all be used to refer to this ethnic group and language. The word Volci was adopted by Germanic speakers and took different forms over time: Walachen, Welchland, Wallis, Wallais, Wallons, Wales, Welschme etc. These terms are still visible in different European languages today and refer to ‘Latin speaker.’ The Slavic speakers borrowed the word from the Germans as: Olahy, Olahi, Valachi, Voloh, Vloh whereas the Byzantines borrowed it as ‘Vlachs’ (Tapanikos, 2020). Their isolated modus vivendi, between pastoral valleys and high mountains, confined them to hardship and socio-cultural periphery, and allowed relative immunity from major European conflicts and periods of unrest spanning short of a millennium. From 1975 when the modern Greek Republic is finally consolidated, the ideology of ‘one people, one language’ is an intrinsic part of Greek nationality and nationalism (Moschonas, 2004). Lacking written, standardized forms, Aromanian has been transmitted orally from generation to generation in the Epirus, Macedonia and Thessally regions of Greece. With profound socio-economic changes and rewards, Aromanians left their pastoral lifestyle in large numbers (Beis, 2000) attracted by prospects of a better future in Greek urban centers and Western European countries, USA, or Australia. In modern times, with Greek being the only language of instruction and communication in the wider society (Chomsky, 1971), the generational language-transfer cycle has been broken, and Aromanian is now endangered (Dinas et al., 2011). On the other hand, Aromanian folklore and traditional festivals are very much alive through associations like the Pan-Hellenic Federation of Cultural Associations of Vlachs, while many self-identified Aromanians do not speak a word of their ancestral language, by choice (Kahl, 2004). How did this (apparent) contradiction come to be? What drove Aromanians away from their language and led to the assimilation into Greek society, language, and culture so completely that it will lead to the death of Aromanian in Greece?