Rhaeto-Romanicn.adj.

1853 M. Schele de Vere Outl. Compar. Philol. l. 328 The Rhaeto-Romanic owes its existence as a distinct and separate dialect..to the political independence of the Canton Grisons. It is a much neglected and mixed dialect.

1867 W. D. Whitney Lang. & Study of Lang. iv. 167 The Rhæto-Romanic of southern Switzerland.

1958 E. Pulgram Tongues of Italy v. 49 A relatively small number (about half a million) of persons speak dialects usually classified together..under the heading Rhaeto-Romanic.

1975 K. Katzner Langs. of World ii. 77 Rhaeto-Romanic is a collective term for three dialects of the Romance family spoken in northeastern Italy and southeastern Switzerland.

2008 Arkansas Democrat-Gaz. (Nexis) 9 Apr. Switzerland has three official languages—German, French and Italian—and a semiofficial one—Rhaeto-Romanic.

1856 Jrnl. Ethnological Soc. 4 269 I was honoured by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin with the commission to inquire after the remnants of the Rhaeto-romanic language in the country of the Grisons and the Tyrol.

1880–1 Trans. Philol. Soc. (1883) 402 The district in which the Rhæto-Romanic language is spoken comprises a large..part of the canton of Bünden, otherwise..Graubünden or Grisons.

1915 E. Maslin-Hulme Renaissance, Protestant Revol. & Catholic Reformation (rev. ed.) xv. 279 In the Engadine and neighboring valleys there is still spoken by some forty thousand people a Rhæto-Romanic language which has a literature, chiefly religious, of its own.

1994 Lit. Rev. (Nexis) 22 June 446 The rapprochement among Rhaeto-Romanic dialects in the past twenty years occurred primarily due to the radio.

2007 E. Holenstein in F. Coulmas Lang. Regimes in Transformation 175 Not everyone can be expected to know the Rhaeto-Romanic name of the village (Segl Maria)..if only a decreasing number of its inhabitants speak Rhaeto-Romanic.