In the Dolomites, a Language Holds Its Ground as the Crowds Rise

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 places the language inside a landscape that grows more popular with tourists every year, and notes that the two facts sit together without resolving each other.

Ladin is a Romance language, distinct from Italian and from German, and it survives in a handful of valleys where the terrain has done as much as any law to keep it intact. France 24 describes villages where the language is understood by the people who live there and by almost no one else, and where millions of visitors pass through each season without encountering it at all.

The report does not claim the language is dying. It describes people who decline to give it up, which is a different and more deliberate position, and one that foreign coverage of the Italian Alps returns to whenever it writes about the high valleys.