Latinized but Not Roman: Genetic, Phonological, and Cultural Evidence for a Shared Paleo-Balkan Substrate Between Aromanians and Albanians

This paper presents a convergent, multi-disciplinary argument that the Aromanian-speaking population - commonly referred to as Vlachs - does not represent a Romanized population of diverse Balkan origin, but rather constitutes a branch of the same paleo-Balkan population from which modern Albanians descend, differentiated primarily by the adoption of Vulgar Latin as a prestige language during intensive Roman administrative contact. The argument draws on four independent lines of evidence: (1) Y-chromosomal and autosomal genetic data demonstrating near-identical haplogroup profiles between Aromanians and Albanians, distinct from both Greeks and South Slavic populations; (2) substrate phonological features in Aromanian that are unexplainable by Latin or Greek, but are structurally parallel to Albanian - including the proclitic consonant morphology, the phonemic rr-distinction, shared vowel reduction, and rotacism; (3) the Aromanian term for the drone in polyphonic singing, isu, sharing structural and performative identity with Albanian iso-polyphony, a tradition UNESCO has designated as intangible cultural heritage; and (4) shared social organization rooted in transhumant pastoralism, patrilineal kinship structures, and a historically attested mutual recognition expressed in the Albanian ethnonym for Aromanians. Taken together, these lines of evidence support the hypothesis that the Latin-Romance surface of Aromanian conceals a substrate that is not merely in contact with Albanian but is Albanian in origin - the phonological, genetic, and cultural remains of a population whose linguistic identity bifurcated under Roman administrative pressure, with one branch preserving the pre-existing IE language and the other adopting Latin while retaining the underlying phonological and social architecture.