ISO 639-3 rmy Native speakers 485,000 (2002–2010) | Glottolog vlax1238 | |
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Native to Bosnia, Romania, Serbia, Albania, Hungary; scattered in numerous other states Recognised minority language in Hungary, Romania, Poland and Serbia Language family Indo-European: Indo-Iranian > Indo-Aryan > Central Zone > Romani > Vlax Romani | ||
Vlax Romani is a dialect group of the Romani language. Vlax Romani varieties are spoken mainly in Southeastern Europe by Romani people. Vlax Romani can also be referred to as an independent language or as one dialect of the Romani language. Vlax Romani is the most widely spoken dialect subgroup of the Romani language worldwide. Most Vlax Romani speakers live in Bosnia-Herzegovina (300,000) followed by Romania (241,617), Albania (60,000) and Colombia (4,850).
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Name
The language's name is derived from the "Vlachs", a medieval exonym referring to the Romanians, as all the Vlax dialects share an extensive influence from Romanian on vocabulary, phonology and morphology. There have been many waves of migration of Roma out of Romania, some of them being connected to the 19th century abolition of slavery in Romania. This name was coined by British scholar Bernard Gilliat-Smith in his 1915 study on Bulgarian Roma, in which he first divided Roma dialects into Vlax and non-Vlax, based on whether they were influenced by Romanian or not.
The similarity of the words Romani and Romania is a coincidence, they are not etymologically related.
Classification
Vlax Romani is classified in two groups: Vlax I, or Northern Vlax (including Kalderash and Lovari), and Vlax II, or Southern Vlax.
Elšík uses this classification and dialect examples (geographical information from Matras ):
Writing systems
Vlax Romani is written using the Romani orthography, which is a Latin alphabet with several additional characters. In the area of the former Soviet Union it is also written in Cyrillic.