Romansh people though with ever-increasing sovereignty and recognition at the federal level to the point that Romansh is now considered one of the official federal languages of the Swiss Confederation. The Romansh national leadership in Switzerland expressly stated its interest in Switzerland joining the European Union in terms of a pro-European stance and not an anti-Swiss-Confederation one, openly recognizing that the Confederation, though dominated by the German Swiss and with large Swiss French and Swiss Italian contingents, had sheltered the tiny Romansh minority population for nearly 200 years, never engaging in programs to erase their identity or language nor forcing them to
Romansh language earlier, pre-literature tradition of using Romansh in administrative and legal situations, of which no evidence survives. In their prefaces, the authors themselves often mention the novelty of writing Romansh, and discuss an apparently common prejudice that Romansh was a language that could not be written. The first writing in the Sursilvan and Sutsilvan dialects appears in the 17th century. As in the Engadine, these early works usually focused on religious themes, in particular the struggles between Protestants and Counter-Reformers. Daniel Bonifaci produced the first surviving work in this category, the catechism "Curt mussameint dels principals punctgs della Christianevla Religiun", published