A Language the Mountains Keep: Ladin Holds On in the Dolomites

France 24 reported this week that the Ladin 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. The report describes villages where the language survives inside the same landscape that draws millions of visitors each year. Tourism, in the French broadcaster's account, is both the threat and the only reason the valleys remain inhabited at all.

The mechanism France 24 describes will be familiar to anyone who has followed minority language policy in Italy. Ladin is protected under the special autonomy arrangements that govern Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol and the neighbouring provinces, which is why the Dolomites have the institutional scaffolding — schooling, signage, broadcasting — that most minority languages in the country do not. The French report treats this as the reason Ladin has a future at all.

Molise is one of the Italian regions that keeps minority languages of its own, in the Albanian-speaking and Croatian-speaking villages of the interior, where the older generations still hold a tongue the young increasingly do not. The wire does not report on those villages, and this dispatch does not claim that it does. What France 24 documents in the Dolomites is a general problem: a language survives where institutions pay for it, and thins where they do not.