Friulan

The Friulans are the people of Friuli, the north-eastern Italian plain between the Julian Alps and the Adriatic. The Romans colonized it from 181 BC, and Aquileia flourished until Attila razed it in 452. In 568 the Lombards made it their first duchy at Forum Iulii, modern Cividale, from which the region takes its name.

In 1337 Friuli was the patriarch of Aquileia's temporal state, until Venice's conquest of 1420. Under Venice they kept their parliament; in 1511 the Fat Thursday peasant rising broke out at Udine.

Friulian is a Rhaeto-Romance language formed around 500 from the Latin of Aquileia with Celtic and Lombardic layers; used in administrative acts from the eleventh century and producing civic literature around 1300, though never official. The 1797 Treaty of Campo Formio gave Friuli to Austria, and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 assigned it to Austrian Lombardy-Venetia.