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Islands in the Sky: Ladin, Romansh and Friulan

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In 1835, an obscure young naturalist named Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands. There he confronted a challenge only a scientist could love. The islands were full of sparrows. Naturally, Darwin felt compelled to sort them by species. He observed that birds from neighbouring islands differed only slightly, and decided they were variations on a single species. Hopping from island to consecutive island, Darwin found no point where the birds could be reliably divided into separate species. Yet sparrows on the first island were clearly a different species from those on the last.

Darwin's observations ultimately led to the formulation of the theory of evolution, a quantum leap forward in human knowledge. But the Darwin discovery most precious to linguists (another get-a-life crowd) is a peripheral principle Darwin sketched out on the way to The Big One. It's called the doctrine of insularity. The basic concept is simple: when a community is divided, and the parts isolated from one another, both halves change in different ways, while retaining similarities. The Dolomite Mountains are the Galapagos of linguistics, their Rhaeto-Romance languages a textbook example of insularity in action.

The dominant topographical feature of the Tyrol in southeastern Switzerland and northern Italy, the rugged Dolomites have few inhabitants. The rare village is literally tacked to a sheer mountainside. Its residents enjoy a killer view, front-door access through the living room floor, and their very own language. The next village may not be far in aerial miles, and is often in view. But getting there requires a laborious descent, then an equally daunting ascent of the neighbouring peak. Once or twice a year someone makes the trip. Imagine the thrill someone who sees the same faces every day must feel at hearing a new joke. Yet the visitor may have to fall back on German or Italian to deliver the punchline; dialects of their common. Rhaeto-Romance language are often mutually unintelligible.

Linguists identify three separate tongues in this family: Friulan, Romansh, and Ladin. But academics and native speakers argue bitterly over the dividing lines. Terms used interchangeably by some experts incite the wrath of others, who insist they can't be. The difficulty lies in the fact that it is hard to determine exactly where Romansh speakers stop and Ladin speakers start, or to categorise "twilight zone" dialects between the extremes. It's like Darwin's sparrow dilemma, and was created by the same natural process. Insularity impacted sparrow procreation in the Galapagos, and shaped human language in the Dolomites.

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