The author begins with a well-documented introduction to the Latinisation of certain Greeks of the north, who survive under various names, but call themselves Aroumanians. He then goes on to discuss the unequal nature of their diglossy, which he attributes to the fact that they have continued to use their ancestral tongue, Greek, almost unceasingly down the centuries, even in the dark period of Turkish domination, founding at their own expense Greek schools in the Vlach mountain villages. Indeed, such was their zeal and love for the Greek language, that they played no small part in its spread among the neighbouring peoples with whom they had dealings.Their gradual acquisition of the popular Latin of the East gave these bilingual Greeks, the Aroumanians, a certain Romanic character. But they differ from the other Romanic peoples, such as the Dacians and the Getae, for instance, whose ancestral tongues were so culturally inferior to Latin that it eventually supplanted them completely. The Aroumanians, however, never discarded their ancestral tongue: they used Latin primarily in their dealings with the Romans and thereafter only within a close family or professional context. Consequently, since Greek remained their principal linguistic organ, the Aroumanian tongue inevitably atrophied to the extent that it became inadequate for the composition of verse. This is precisely the reason why there is no genuine Aroumanian demotic poetry. Amongst the Romanic peoples, the Aroumanians are unique in this respect. With a few possible exceptions, the demotic songs which have been presented as Aroumanian from the nineteenth
century onwards are not genuine. The Aroumanians do indeed have splendid demotic verse of their own, but it is in Greek, because, as T. Papahagi so correctly observes, Greek is incomparably superior to the Aroumanian language.