In the Dolomites, 30,000 Speakers Hold a Language Against the Season

France 24 reported this week that the Ladin-speaking valleys of the Dolomites are refusing to let go of a language spoken by roughly 30,000 people — one of the oldest minority languages in Europe, and one that exists almost nowhere outside the mountains. The broadcaster framed the story around a paradox: year after year the Dolomites draw more visitors, and the same crowds that sustain the valleys also press on the speech communities that live in them.

Ladin is not a dialect of Italian in any simple sense. It belongs to the Rhaeto-Romance family, alongside Romansh in Switzerland and Friulian further east, a relic of the Latin spoken in the Alpine provinces before the modern languages consolidated around them. France 24 notes that the language survives in a territory of about 30,000 speakers, which in practice means the survival of Ladin depends on a small number of valleys rather than on any national institution.