At VA, 'Romanisms' denote all terms that were recorded in today’s German and Slavic regions within the research area and are derived directly from Roman and indirectly from Latin or pre-Roman languages. In this context, two different geolinguistic and historical constellations can be distinguished with regard to the regional stratigraphy as well as the large-scale 'architecture' of German and Slovenian.

(1) Exclusively dialectal Romanisms

This category, which consists of local variants without equivalents in the standard language, somewhat constitutes the prototypical Roman loanwords of the Alpine region. As a rule, these are substrate words, i.e. expressions that were borrowed during the period of Roman-Germanic or Roman-Slavic bilingualism and have survived the later language change to Germanic or Slavic monolingualism grosso modo as local relics. A clear example is provided by the morpho-lexical type Käser, which, like its Roman equivalent casera, goes back to the Latin base type caseu(m): cf. the map on the morpho-lexical type casera.

(2) Dialectal Romanisms with equivalents in the standard language and in the Roman dialects of the study area The following map clearly shows that the masculine Southern German variant der Butter forms a common area with the likewise masculine Roman types butirro and beurre and thus must be regarded as historically predominant to the feminine standard variant die Butter: cf. the map of the base type butyru(m).

However, this pattern of Southern German borrowing first and its spread into standard German second does not always seem clear-cut, as the possibility of a reverse spread from the standard into dialects of the study area must also be considered. This might be how the German equivalents of the Latin base type cellārium could be viewed.
In the case of both exclusively dialectal and dialectal-standard Romanisms, a distinction must be made between substratal local relicts and adstratal borrowings with secondary areal distribution.