Rhaeto-Romance languages
proposed branch of Gallo-Rhaetian consisting of Friulian, Ladin, and Romansh
Rhaeto-Romance, Rheto-Romance, or Rhaetian, is a purported subfamily of the Romance languages that is spoken in south-eastern Switzerland and north-eastern Italy. The name "Rhaeto-Romance" refers to the former Roman province of Raetia. The question of whether these languages actually form a subfamily is called the Questione Ladina. The Italian linguist Graziadio Ascoli, writing in 1873, found them to share a number of intricacies and believed they formed a linguistic group. The Rhaeto-Romance languages differ from Italian in their evolution from Latin by having passed through a stage with phonemic vowel length, undergone certain consonant developments, and possibly developed a pair of central rounded vowels (now lost everywhere). If the subfamily is genuine, three languages would belong to it: Romansh in Switzerland, and Ladin and Friulian in Italy. Their combined number of speakers is about 660,000; the large majority of these (about 500,000) speak Friulian.
History of Rhaeto-Romance studies
The first reference that somehow connects the Swiss and Italian Rhaeto-Romance dialects is a letter from 1559 by Pier Paolo Vergerio, who simply observes that the language of the Three Leagues (Romansh) is "almost worse than Friulian, itself extremely impoverished", probably alluding to lexical contamination or impoverishment, without implying a real genetic proximity between the systems.
A more advanced position appears in Giusto Fontanini's Della eloquenza italiana (1737), which proposes a genetic relationship between Romansh, Friulian and some Savoyard dialects, traced back to a supposed "original Romance" identified with Vulgar Latin. In 1776 J. von Planta, in An account of the Romansh language, instead supports a closeness between Rhaeto-Romance and the Carolingian language, on a multilingual presentation of the Oath of Strasbourg (842), in the original Gallic Romansh, in twelfth-century French, in Engadine and in a "Romansh of both dialects".
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This entry incorporates text from “Rhaeto-Romance languages” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.