In the Alps region there it is an area (formerly very huge) populated by neolatin populations that survives assimilation only in three small territories: in Switzerland (Canton Grisons) and in Italy (Trentino-AltoAdige & Friuli). In these areas are spoken respectively: Romansh, Ladin and Friulan, spoken actually by more than 700000 inhabitants in Switzerland and Italy.
When the Romans conquered the Alpine region known as Raetia, the local Celtic and Rhaetic peoples gradually adopted the language of their conquerors: Vulgar Latin. For centuries, this Alpine Latin evolved in relative isolation, separated by formidable mountain barriers from the developing Romance languages in what would become France and Italy. This isolation allowed a unique set of linguistic features to develop and solidify. The result is a group of languages that don’t fit neatly into the Italo-Romance or Gallo-Romance (French) families. Instead, they form a kind of linguistic bridge between them, sharing features of both while retaining their own distinct character.
The very idea of them being a unified “family” was a subject of fierce academic debate known as the Questione Ladina (“Ladin Question”). It was the pioneering Italian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli who, in 1873, first convincingly argued that Romansh, Ladin, and Friulian were not simply dialects of Italian but remnants of a once-widespread "Latin Continuum" that stretched across the Alps.
HISTORY
In the provinces of the Roman Empire south of the Danube called "Noricum" and "Rhaetia", the Latinized inhabitants did not completely disappear when the barbarian invasions devastated the region. Many were exterminated and others took refuge in Italy, but some survived in the Alps mountains.
Those who lived in Rhaetia gave rise to the Ladin and Rhaeto-Romance languages of Switzerland and northern Italy, but those of Noricum survived only a few centuries until the time of Charlemagne.
That is to say, the Ladin/Rhaeto-Romance language exists today, but the Romance language of Noricum (which roughly coincides with present-day Austria) has disappeared. The explanation seems to be that Noricum and, in general, present-day central and eastern Austria were more exposed than Switzerland to the devastating invasions of the Huns of Attila and later of the Avars.
During the Middle Ages, there were now-extinct Rhaeto-Romance populations in northern Switzerland and in Austria/Bavaria, in areas called: Walchental, Wakhen, Walchengag, Wakhensef, and Winkhen.
Romansh in the early Middle Ages was spoken over a much wider area, stretching north into the present-day swiss cantons of Glarus and St. Gallen, to the Walensee in the northwest, and Rüthi and the Alpine Rhine Valley in the northeast. In the east, parts of modern-day Vorarlberg were Romansh-speaking, as were parts of Tirol.
The northern areas, called Lower Raetia, became German-speaking by the 12th century; and by the 15th century, the Rhine Valley of St. Gallen and the areas around the Walensee were entirely German-speaking. This language shift was a long, drawn-out process, with larger, central towns adopting German first, while the more peripheral areas around them remained Romansh-speaking longer.
The shift to German was caused in particular by the influence of the local German-speaking élites (with the help of the local church priests) and secondarily by German-speaking immigrants from the north, with the lower and rural classes retaining Romansh longer. If interested read https://web.archive.org/web/20131104161427/http://www.liarumantscha.ch/data/media/pdf/facts_figures/facts_figures_english.pdf.
Furthermoreand until the time of Napoleon, Rhaeto-Romance was spoken in the Austrian Vorarlberg, while in the Val Venosta of the Italian "Alto Adige" (called also "South Tirol") there were Ladin/Rhaeto-Romance communities until the end of the 19th century.
Currently in the Canton Grisons in southeastern Switzerland, exists the Romansh -with its own literature and many dialects- that is considered the fourth official language of Switzerland (with German, French and Italian) and is the primary language of 60000 inhabitants. It is fragmented into five main dialects (Sursilvan, Sutsilvan, Surmiran, Puter, and Vallader). In the 1980s, a standardized written form, Rumantsch Grischun, was created to unify the language for official use, a move that remains controversial among speakers of the individual dialects.
The Ladin is spoken in the Alto Adige valleys of northern Italy, in the Dolomites and north of Trento (and also in the province of Udine, near the Tagliamento River, in northeast Italy). It is estimated that around 50,000 people speak this Rhaeto-Romance as a first or second language (excluding the Friulian speakers of northern Italy, who are more than half a million).
Furthermore. it is important to note that the scholar Piccottini asserts that the extinct "Austrian Romance language" (spoken for some centuries -after the Roman empire fall- in central & southern Austria) belongs to the Rhaeto-Romance group (or at least was a proto-Rhaeto-Romance language), based on its geographical proximity to the current Romansh/Ladin/Friulian areas in the Swiss-Italian Alps. He even believes that it assimilated some words from the pre-Roman Raetic language, especially in Austrian Tirol.
Indeed, in the Tirolean region of western Austria, between Innsbruck and Vaduz (the name of the capital of Liechtenstein comes from the Neo-Latin word "avadutz," meaning aqueduct in Romansh), Rhaeto-Romance was also spoken until the time of the French Revolution.
The Alto Adige line of haplogroup "R1b-U152"
In all the Tirolean & Austrian propaganda against the Italian Alto Adige there it is always a reference to the fact that this territory is considered to have been ALWAYS a German speaking area, that the Italian fascism (of Tolomei et al) wanted to Italianize after WW1. But the Austrian Tiroleans always forget in their writings that only in the last four/five centuries before 1918 the romance language have become a minority language in what is now called Alto Adige.
The area around Bolzano has always been the most populated in Alto Adige with a huge romance speaking community; and in Napoleon times it was united to his Kingdom of Italy because ethnically romance speaking. Furthermore the valley "Venosta" west of Merano until the second half of the Settecento (XVIII century) was populated mostly by Ladins.
These facts -together with the existence of Ladins in Val Gardena and surroundings even now- clearly explains why Tolomei and other Italian academics & historians considered that the German-speaking Tiroleans were not an autochthonous population in the Alto Adige region.
Tolomei looked as a reference for the "re-italianization" of Alto adige to the process of assimilation done in France after WW1 with the former mostly German speaking Alsace-Lorraine regions. He was well esteemed by the French authorities: in 1935 Tolomei -promoted to "Senator of the Kingdom of Italy"- received the "Légion d'honneur" from the "République française". The award motivation was: "In giving you this high distinction, the Government of the French Republic has taken care to recognize the outstanding services that you have rendered to the Latinity before, during and after the war (...) with your action in the Alto Adige defense outpost of the Latin block against Germanism".
Tolomei and the line of haplogroup "R1b-U152"
Tolomei correctly pinpointed that the germanization was huge north of Merano and Bolzano, but in the val Venosta area it has only happened since the century before the French Revolution and in the Bolzano area only since the XIX century. So he indicated that there was an approximate line related to the presence of less or more than 20% of blonde hair in the population, that clearly divided in two the Alto Adige: north of the line there were people mostly German speaking since the Middle Ages, while south of the line the presence of romance population was evident in the darker hair of most people.
Curiously in recent years the genetic studies have confirmed this line, with the genetic signature of the haplogroup "R1b-U152". Indeed the ancient Romans, from the original founders of Rome to the patricians of the Roman Republic, should have been essentially R1b-U152 people. See the above map for further understanding, showing the orange line (related to 33% of the population) of the haplogroup "R1b-U152" that is similar to the one of the 20% blonde hairs in the population (north of the line the habitants are more blonde and germanised, while south are less -because more than the 33% of the total population has this kind of haplogroup- like in northern Italy).
Finally we must remember in detail the biggest process of (often forced) german assimilation that happened in the alpine northern region of Italian Alto Adige. Here it is a map of the ethnicity in the Alto Adige in 1900, showing in red the areas of Romance language and in blue those German speaking:
It is noteworthy to pinpoint that it is possible to see in the map that there were areas of Alto Adige with a majority of Italians/Ladins (in red), that now have disappeared, like around Salorno, Merano and near Switzerland (for example, in Val Venosta -near the Switzerland border- until the 1820s was only spoken the "Romansh language"). The following is an interesting essay about this forced assimilation:
(read:also Archivio Alto Adige; Italiani a Merano e dintorni nell'Ottocento)
The Forced Germanization of the Italian Val Venosta
One of the last Ladin areas to pass to the German language was the Upper Val Venosta (Vinschgau). It was not a voluntary transition from Ladin to a new language, but a forced assimilation which is not often cited or discussed in Tyrolean historiography; indeed, it is often ignored. In the past, Tyrolean historiography was mainly focused on attempting to demonstrate the long history of German culture in South Tyrol from the conquest of the Bavarii onward. Even today, this attitude does not seem to have changed much among German authors.
However, in the 14th and 15th centuries Romansh was the only language used in the court of Glorenza (Glurns). This is an irrefutable sign that the population was exclusively Romansh and monolingual. Up to that time there were many cultural, social and economic contacts with the neighboring people of Müstair and the Engadine, who spoke the same language, which has left an impact on the local culture (architecture, toponymy). The Val Venosta, moreover, belonged to the diocese of Chur.
Around 1600, Romansh in the Val Venosta was in a position very similar to that of Ladin in the Val Gardena today, in other words quite strong. Until about 1620 the Abbey of Monte Maria (Marienberg) called upon the Capuchins of Müstair to preach to the people in Romansh. This demonstrates that the population of the Val Venosta was hardly bilingual at that time.
In 1898 a German historian wrote:
“The Val di Mazia (near Malles Venosta) was still Romansh in the 1600's, and even a century later Romansh was still very common in the Val Venosta. It has already been mentioned that Tubre in the Val Monastero passed to the German language only about 70 years ago, while in nearby Müstair (in Switzerland) Ladin is still spoken today, and even in Stelvio at the beginning of the 19th century there were still people who spoke Ladin.” [1]“Tubre was cleansed of the Romansh language only after 1750”, says an old history book. [2] The use of the term ‘cleansed’ (German: geräumt) demonstrates quite well the attitude of the Germans at that time. Indeed, the Romansh language was wiped out as a result of a prohibition against using the language. The German language was required for meetings, while the Ladin language was prohibited. Likewise the employment of Romansh maids and servants was prohibited, Romansh customs were prohibited, and even marriages with Romansh people were prohibited. The main promoter of these prohibitions was the abbot of Marienberg Abbey, Mathias Lang, infamous for his fanaticism.
The motive or excuse for this Germanization was the Reformation: it was feared that Protestant ideas could penetrate Catholic Tyrol through the Romansh language (“barbaric Romansh”, as it was also called), since the inhabitants of the neighboring Grisons are partly Protestant. It is of little importance that the prohibition of the language was said to be motivated by these fears. The truth is that when the leader does not understand the language of his subjects, the use of this language is criminalized.
Thus the Upper Val Venosta was Germanized. Despite the methods adopted — methods which anticipated those later used for the assimilation of minorities in the 20th century — the extinction of the Ladin language did not have such a rapid success. According to glottologists, Romansh-speakers still lived in the Upper Val Venosta in the 1820's. Today there are still many testimonies of Ladin heritage in the region: it can be observed in the local dialect, as well as in many toponyms.
The Romansh area during Charlemagne rule in the IX century.
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