Romansh language develop. During the 19th century the area where the language was spoken declined, but the Romansh speakers had a literary revival and started a language movement dedicated to halting the decline of the language. In the 2000 Swiss census, 35,095 people (of whom 27,038 live in the canton of Grisons) indicated Romansh as the language of "best command", and 61,815 as a "regularly spoken" language. In 2010, Switzerland switched to a yearly system of assessment that uses a combination of municipal citizen records and a limited number of surveys. Based on this yearly system, the number of people aged 15
Romansh language Friulan and Ladin were not separate languages but rather Italian dialects. They used this as an argument to claim the territories for Italy where these languages were spoken. From a sociolinguistic perspective, however, this question is largely irrelevant. The speakers of Romansh have always identified as speaking a language distinct from both Italian and other Romance varieties. Romansh comprises a group of closely related dialects, which are most commonly divided into five different varieties, each of which has developed a standardized form. These standardized regional standards are referred to as "idioms" in Romansh to distinguish them from the local vernaculars,