Page:The nomads of the Balkans, an account of life and customs among the Vlachs of Northern Pindus (1914).djvu/11

 and the other towns and villages near by. The villages in the hills however are always regarded by the Vlachs as being their real home ; they are essentially a mountain people and as soon as they begin to settle permanently in the plains, as many have done in the past, far away from their native hills and woods and streams they lose their national characteristics and rapidly become merged into the surrounding races. Their language both in its vocabulary and structure is clearly descended from Latin—so much so that a Latin grammar solves many of the difficulties—and is closely allied to Roumanian, of which it is in fact a dialect. But like all the Balkan languages in their common spoken forms Vlach contains a large number of foreign words and phrases, borrowed from Greek, Slavonic, Turkish and Albanian, the proportion from each varying in the different districts. The earliest record of spoken Vlach goes back to the sixth century a.d., but it seems not to have been written till the eighteenth century when a Greek script was employed. Since the beginning of the national movement about the middle of last century the Roumanian alphabet has been adopted.

Excepting some of the women in certain of the more remote villages all the Vlachs of both sexes know in addition to their native language at least one other tongue, either Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian or Serb. In the case of the women however this is largely a modern development for only fifty years ago in an accessible village like Metsovo few knew any other language but Vlach ; the men on the other hand owing to the necessities of trade have almost certainly been bilingual for many generations. The Vlachs call themselves ‘Romans,’ or in their own dialect Arumāni, which is really the same word, just as the Greeks still commonly call themselves ‘Romei’ and their language ‘Romeika.’ By the Bulgarians, Serbs and Albanians the Vlachs are known as Tsintsars which is a nickname derived from the numerous hissing sounds in Vlach suggestive of mosquitoes. Thus the Roumanian cinci (five) is in Vlach tsintsi.

By the Greeks the Vlachs are known as Vlakhi or more accurately as Kutsovlakhi. The name Vlach which is a