Vlachs

Vlach ( ), also Wallachian and many other variants, is a term and exonym used from the Middle Ages until the Modern Era to designate speakers of Eastern Romance languages living in Southeast Europe—south of the Danube (the Balkan peninsula) and north of the Danube.

Although it has also been used to name present-day Romanians, the term "Vlach" today refers primarily to speakers of the Eastern Romance languages who live south of the Danube, in Albania, Bulgaria, northern Greece, North Macedonia and eastern Serbia. These people include the ethnic groups of the Aromanians, the Megleno-Romanians and, in Serbia, the Timok Vlachs. The term also became a synonym in the Balkans for the social category of shepherds, and was also used for non-Romance-speaking rural Christians (mostly Orthodox), in recent times in Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina derogatively. The term is also used to refer to the ethnographic group of Moravian Vlachs who speak a Slavic language but have Vlach origins, as well as for Morlachs and Istro-Romanians.