Ladin

The Ladins are a Romance mountain people of the Dolomites, holding valleys in South Tyrol, Trentino and near Belluno. They descend from the Rhaetian population of the Alps, whose Vulgar Latin speech formed, around the year 1000, an unbroken Rhaeto-Romance belt from the Swiss Alps to the Julian Alps.

From the sixth century Bavarii pressing in from the north and Gallo-Italic speakers from the south split the belt and left the Ladins isolated in remote valleys.

In 1337 their lands were divided among the County of Tyrol and the prince-bishoprics of Brixen and Trent, while Cadore to the south belonged to Venice, and Habsburg rule brought steady Germanization. Ladin survived as a chain of valley dialects with no written standard until the early nineteenth century, when the priest Micurà de Rü made the first attempt to fix it in writing.