I'm sorry but that's simply inaccurate. Vlachs refers to all speakers of descendants of Proto-Romanian, including Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian, also known as Eastern Romance. It's not common for someone to argue this but I try not to be as biased.
None of these people historically called *themselves* Vlachs, it was an exonym from others. They all used descendants of romanus as their ethnonym. Nowadays some Aromanians or Megleno Romanians use vlasi but that was a more recent development.
The languages are too close together to have nothing in common other than just deriving from Latin. It's not like the difference between Romanian vs. Italian or vs. French or Spanish. The languages have wayyy too many common particularities and idiosyncracies (which are not found in any other Romance groups) to be the result of completely unrelated Latinization events; trust me, I've studied linguistics in depth. Every serious linguist sees Romanian and Aromanian (as well as the other languages I mentioned above), as having been one solid language at some point, possibly as recently as 1000 years ago.
Romanian linguists in the past have gone as far as saying it is a dialect of their language, which I disagree with. Over the last millennium, they have changed enough to be separate languages. Romanian got more Slavic and Hungarian influence while Aromanian got more Greek and Turkish. They *both* share a common body of some *basic* early South Slavic borrowings, which end up essentially the same between them, and they *both* have a few hundred words in common with only Albanian. Some Greek found its way into (Daco-) Romanian as well, but through different routes.
If you look at this list of Aromanian words derived from Latin, almost all of them have a close cognate with Romanian, and in many cases they look quite different in the Western Romance languages. Their orthography (system/mode of spelling is a bit different so some words may look more different than they are).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Categ...ved_from_Latin
There are also visible connections in that shepherding was in the past a very important aspect of Romanian life (focusing on sheep), while Aromanians were big shepherds of goats.
I'm not saying the Vlach migration theory is true and for a long time I was very against it but now I am beginning to see some merit in some of the ideas. But I'm for an ad-migration model, where some proto-Romanians/Vlachs were already on the north side of the Danube river, maybe partly into the territory of what is now Romania but not all over it, certainly not in Moldova or the far north and east. But I think Oltenia and southern Transylvania at least had some continuous settlement from the original Latinized inhabitants, to which more was added to later by Latinized peoples from the south of the river. In fact, it's mentioned that many of the colonists and soldiers were driven back south across the river after Germanic and Hun invasions, to be settled in Moesia or a "new Dacia" in what's now northern Bulgaria/east Serbia. It may be that some of these same peoples descendants then later went back across. And probably many of the leftover people that they encountered north of the river were free Dacians mixed with Slavs and Germanics and Scythians and stuff anyway, so in a way there WAS some continuity of some sort regardless of language.
There is records of some possibly Vlach chieftains in Transylvania in the 800s. But the problem with the migration theory is there is simply no record of a widespread migration like that. If there would have been enough Vlachs to populate an area as large as Romania/former Dacia or to assimilate and force the existing inhabitants to speak THEIR language, you would think someone would have noted that in a chronicle or something. I mean what would compel a bunch of Slavs and Germanics or whatnot to willingly adopt the language of these simple Vlach peasants, who were mostly shepherds, pastoral, or agrarian people? That just doesn't add up...
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