RMY - Name

Name

The language's name is derived from the "Vlach", a medieval exonym referring to the Romanians, as all the Vlax dialects share an extensive influence from Romanian language 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 or not by Romanian.