File talk:Romanian and Vlach language in Serbia.png

Vlachs language

Ok, Olahus, since you refer to this article as a source of your POV, please elaborate where exactly on this page is provided an source that claim that Serbian government recognized that vlach language is romanian language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlachs_of_Serbia#Language 194.106.189.100 06:57, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Sorry to intervene in this dispute, but shouldn't Vlach and Romanian be regarded as one language in the same way Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian are considered by some linguists to be a single language (Serbo-Croatian)? See this map and the file summary for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serbo_croatian_language2005.png I don't deny the fact that the Government of Serbia has listed the 2 languages as separate in the 2002 census, but it would be more conveniently to treat them as one language since they are mutually intelligible and, according to the Wiki article on the Vlachs of Serbia, Vlach is actually a variety of Romanian (it's not even a dialect!). Andrein 17:36, 1 June 2010 (EET)

Well, I am aware of similarity with case of Serbo-Croatian and that is why I did not proposed this map for deletion, like I proposed some maps that were uploaded by Olahus. If we speak about Serbo-Croatian, there are in fact two different presentations of this language: this one and this one. Perhaps in this Romanian/Vlach case there should be also two maps, where this one would represent opinion of some linguists and another one results of Serbian census. 194.106.189.149 19:42, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Ok. So in the case of Serbo-Croatian we're dealing with political interpretations of the various former-YU countries and some of the linguists (especially the Croatian linguists) versus the opinion of some other linguists, mainly the Serbian ones. I see there are many similarities with the Vlach/Romanian case, but still the fact that the 2002 census listed the 2 languages as separate does not imply that Vlach is not a dialect/variety of Romanian. In this case, it could be argued that the census decided to differentiate between the Romanian (Banatian) variety spoken in Vojvodina and the Vlach variety spoken in North-Eastern Central Serbia. In my opinion, the best solution would be to have a single map with the title [Varieties of the Romanian language spoken in Serbia] and to represent both of these varieties with slightly different colours (purple for Romanian and blue for Vlach for example).

In respect to the ethnicity of the Vlachs, I know that almost all of the Vlachs have declared themselves as either Vlachs or Serbs in the last Serbian census. In this case, I see no reason why we should try to make Romanians out of them. It was their decision to declare themselves as something else after all. And I don't suspect the Serbian Government has any interest in changing the ethno-linguistic character in a region which, as far as I know, has never been the target of Greater Romanian nationalism.

However, for historic reasons, I think we should keep those pre-World War II maps in which the Vlachs and Romanians are lumped together without any comments (a wiki article link would be enough). In that period, it was considered, even by the Serbian official authorities which conducted the 1895, 1921 and 1931 censuses, that Vlachs were of Romanian ethnicity. The real controversy is wheteher the Vlachs can or cannot be treated as belonging to the Romanian ethnicity after World War II. You should put the necessary comments only in the summaries of those maps dealing with the Vlach ethnic group after 1948.

Andrein 11:30, 2 June 2010 (EET)