A Language 30,000 Speak, and the Interior That Recognises the Arithmetic

France 24 reported this week that the Ladin-speaking villages of the Dolomites are refusing to abandon a language understood by roughly 30,000 people, even as the mountains around them draw millions of visitors a year. The network described Ladin as one of the oldest minority languages in Europe, and framed its survival as a deliberate choice by the communities that speak it rather than a natural outcome of geography.

The story is familiar in outline to anyone who follows Italy's linguistic map. Italy recognises a dozen historical minority languages, several of them protected by law and by Article 6 of the Constitution, and the country's smaller communities have long argued that recognition on paper and survival in practice are different things. France 24's reporting places Ladin among those that have so far managed the second.