ABSTRACT
Phonological and morphological criteria fail to establish Rhaeto-Romance unity. In spite of occasional claims to the contrary, lexical criteria also fail: nor is this surprising, given the notorious unstability of the lexicon. What we expect, in fact, is what we find: like all other Romance languages, the Rhaeto-Romance languages share a great deal of Latin vocabulary. In sharing a Gallic substratum and influences of the Germanic populations with the Central Romance dialects, they share a great deal more specifically with the other Italian dialects north of La Spezia-Rimini. Moreover, since each of them is overshadowed by one or more prestige languages, all of them have borrowed extensively from these prestige languages: in recent times, Romansh has borrowed primarily from German, and the Italian dialects have borrowed from Trentino, Venetian, or standard Italian. Of course, Swiss Romansh and some Ladin dialects (particularly Gardenese and Badiot) are still under heavy German influence.
