The Ladins of Dolomites

The Ladins are a community living in five valleys leading off the Sella massif in the Dolomites, where still today a language of ancient origins is spoken. Despite their diversity, the idioms spoken in Gardena, Badia, Fassa, Livinallongo and Ampezzo are local varieties of the same language – Ladin – that has its own specific autonomy among Romance, i.e. neo-Latin languages.

The Dolomitic Ladin language (or central Ladin; approx. 30,000 speakers) is the central portion of a wider linguistic system that also includes the Canton of the Grisons (Switzerland) where Romans is spoken (or western Ladin: approx. 40,000 speakers), and the Friuli region, with Friulano (or eastern Ladin: more than 700,000 speakers). 
The three areas represent what remains of a wider Romance territory that once extended from the sources of the Rhine as far as the Adriatic sea, and that was subsequently reduced and fragmented due to migrations and to the linguistic influences from the Po-Veneto plain.

The regulations of the Autonomous Region of Trentino – South Tyrol safeguard the Ladins as the third linguistic group beside the German and the Italian ones, while national legislation places the Ladin community with the linguistic minorities recognised according to the principles set out in art. 3 of the Italian Constitution.

Despite the administrative division of the Dolomitic Ladin area, linguistic awareness and the sense of identity are well-rooted and supported by a dense network of associations, whose work has been assisted in recent decades by that of major institutions and research centres.