| Etymology Of Vlach |
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The Slavic term in turn derives from . As the Celts of Gaul were Romanized, the word changed its meaning to " Romanic People ", as it is still kept in the name of the '' Walloons '' of Belgium and in the German Exonym s:
Later on, the meaning of this noun in Slavic Languages got narrower or just different: From the Slavs, it was passed on to other peoples, such as the Hungarians ("Oláh") and Byzantines/Greeks ("Βλάχοί", "Vlachoi") and was used for all Latin people of the Balkans. It also acquired a second meaning: " Shepherd ", after the occupation of many Vlachs of Greece and Serbia. In Albania, the opposite occurred: ''çoban'' "shepherd" comes to mean "Vlach". In German the word "vlach" was a pejorative name for an Orthodox Christian, a Serbian immigrant. The term was originally an exonym, as the Vlachs used various words derived from ''romanus'' to refer to themselves (''români, rumâni, rumâri, aromâni, arumâni'', ''armâni'' etc). Historically, it was used to refer to all Latin people of the Balkans, but nowadays, this term is only rarely used to refer the Romanians, but rather to refer to the Aromanians, Istro-Romanians and Megleno-Romanians. However, in Serbia, the Romanian minority (living especially in Vojvodina , Timok Valley ), although they are speaking the Daco-Romanian (standard Romanian) dialect, they are still referred as "Vlachs". In the Yugoslavian census figures, the Aromanians of Macedonia and the Romanians of Serbia were both classified as "Vlachs". A name used for the Southern Vlachs of Greece is "Kutsovlach" (literally "limping Vlach"; possibly a reference to the way they spoke Greek), however the Aromanians consider it quite offensive. Another name used to refer to the Aromanians (mainly in the Slavic countries: Serbia and Bulgaria) is "tsintsar", which is derived from the way the Aromanians say the word 'five': "tsintsi". Another Balkanic ethnicity is the Morlachs or Mavrovalachi (Greek for "black Vlachs"). SEE ALSO REFERENCES
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