La romanità sud-est europea vista dagli Altri: Valacchi e Valacchie nel Medioevo tra Oriente e Occidente

The first aim of this report is “to draw the bundaries" that is to overcome the dichotomy "Eastern-Western" in focusing the “Vlach Question” from a particular viewpoint: the lexical and ethnic stratification in the Albanian and Macedonian area. On the backgorund of the main linguistic traditions in the Balkan Middle Ages (Slavic, Medieval Latin and Romance [spec. Romanian, Macedo-Romanian], Byzantine Greek, Turkish, and Albanian), the coexistence of three different lemmata in Albanian for “Vlach” (Vllah, R[r]ëmër and Çoban, respectively of Southern Slavic, Latin and Turkish or maybe Turko-Avaric origins) documents convincingly that (1st) the ethnic meaning ‘Roman, someone speaking a romance language’ is older than the socio-professional one ‘nomadic shepherd, mountaineer, caravaner’ and (2nd) at least the Vlachias spread all over the Balkan Peninsula seem to become multiethnic communities in the Middle Ages, though with a prominent presence of people speaking Romance (early Macedo-Romanian) dialects.