Eastern Romance languages ||This article needs additional
citations for verification. (June 2009)| |Southeast Europe,
Istria| Map of Balkans with regions currently significantly
inhabited by Romanians/Vlachs highlighted The Eastern Romance
languages in their narrow conception, sometimes known as the
Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed
in Southeastern Europe from the local eastern variant of Vulgar
Latin. Some classifications include the Italo-Dalmatian
languages; when Italian is classified as Western Romance,
Dalmatian generally remains in Eastern. This article will be
concerned with Eastern Romance in the narrow sense, without
Italian. Several hundred years after the Roman Empire's
dominance of the region, the local form of Vulgar Latin
developed into Proto-Romanian, a language which had most of the
features of modern Romanian. Probably due to foreign invasions
(see Romania in the Dark Ages) and the migration of Vlach
shepherds (see Vlachs in Wallachia), between 800 AD and 1200 A