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Ladinia
The beginning of the linguistic history concerning Ladin corresponds with the history of the colonisers which came to these territories, namely with the arrival of the Romans who came to submit the populations that had settled there before. Already the name of the interested language suggests a close link with Latin, the language spoken and transported by the soldiers and traders coming from Rome.
The Ladin territories were conquered in different periods of time: the first to be submitted to the Roman Empire was the Cisalpine Gaul already three centuries before Christ. In 181 BC the city of Aquileia was founded, from where the Romanization of the Paleo-Venetians and Carinthians started out. In 35 BC the conquest of Cadore seemed to be concluded, whereas Rhaetia was only conquered in 15 BC. The politics applied by the Romans and in particular by Caesar Augustus was a politics of peace without any fierce battles or wars.
In regard to language, there was not much left of Rhaetic or Celtic, that is to say of the languages that were spoken in that territory before the arrival of the Romans. Some words that have been transmitted up to our times are for example bedoi (birch), brama (cream) or dlasena (blueberry). Others, such as barantl (mountain pine), crëp (mountain), morona (chain), nida (whey) or roa (landslide) can also be considered to be older and they cannot be led back to a Latin root. Therefore, they are generally considered to be part of the Alpine vocabulary of an age before the Roman conquest.
As far as pronunciation is concerned, it seems that the “ü” of the long Latin phoneme /ū/ which is nowadays only present in the variation of Val Badia, but which was formerly very widely spread also in the other valleys, is also an element deriving from the Celtic substratum. All the remaining features of Dolomite Ladin can exclusively be led back to a Latin root. This is true for the formation of the words as well as for the words themselves. Just think of words like plöia (from Latin PLUVIA(M)), fre (from Latin FRATRE(M)) or će (from Latin CAPUT).
Later on, imported by populations of Central Europe, slowly also Germanic forced its way through to influence, reduce or even substitute the Neo-Latin element in the Alpine idioms. From the 4th century after Christ onwards, Germanic populations kept pushing further south. The process of Germanisation spread wider and wider, reaching the adjoining territories around today’s Ladin valleys in a very short time. The Neo-Latin territories left always more and more space to the northern conquerors and the people speaking Ladin were always less and less.
Even in the territories where Ladin is still spoken, many Germanic words have been assimilated and so the same occurred with Germanic as it had occurred some centuries before with Latin: it had an influence on the language on different levels: it modified phonetics as well as lexis, morphology as well as syntax.
For example, words like stlet (from “schlecht”, bad), galber (from “Gärber”, tanner) or plata (from “Blatt”, sheet) come from the Germanic substratum. As far as syntax is concerned, Germanic has reinforced an anciently present phenomenon which can be found in other Northern Italian dialects, too, as well as in Old French or in other Neo-Latin languages, namely the compulsive presence of a subject in every sentence, a feature which is still today typical of German and of course of the Ladin idioms.