The Eastern Romance languages are a group of Romance languages. The group, also called the Balkan Romance or Daco-Romance languages, comprises the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian), the Aromanian language and two other related minor languages, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian. Some classifications also include the extinct Dalmatian language (otherwise included in the Italo-Dalmatian group) as part of the Eastern Romance subgroup, considering Dalmatian a bridge between Italian and Romanian.

Languages

Eastern Romance comprises Romanian (or Daco-Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian, according to the most widely accepted classification of the Romance languages. The four languages sometimes labelled as dialects of Romanian and were developed from a common ancestor mostly referred as Common Romanian. They are surrounded by non-Romance languages. Judaeo-Spanish (or Ladino) is also spoken in the Balkan Peninsula, but it is rarely listed among the other Romance languages of the region because it is rather an Iberian Romance language that developed as a Jewish dialect of Old Spanish in the far west of Europe, and it began to be spoken widely in the Balkans only after the influx of Ladino-speaking refugees into the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century.

Internal classification

Within the Glottolog database, the languages are classified as follows: Peter R. Petrucci, by contrast, states that Common Romanian had developed into two major dialects by the 10th century, and that Daco-Romanian and Istro-Romanian are descended from the northern dialect, while Megleno-Romanian and Aromanian are descended from the southern dialect.

Samples of Eastern Romance languages

Note: the lexicon used below is not universally recognized.

Sources