Friulian ( ) or Friulan (natively or ; ; ; ) is a Romance language belonging to the Rhaeto-Romance family, spoken in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy. Friulian has around 600,000 speakers, the vast majority of whom also speak Italian. It is sometimes called Eastern Ladin since it shares the same roots as Ladin, but over the centuries, it has diverged under the influence of surrounding languages, including German, Italian, Venetian, and Slovene. Documents in Friulian are attested from the 11th century and poetry and literature date as far back as 1300. By the 20th century, there was a revival of interest in the language. History A question that causes many debates is the influence of the Latin spoken in Aquileia and surrounding areas. Some claim that it had peculiar features that later passed into Friulian. Epigraphs and inscriptions from that period show some variants if compared to the standard Latin language, but most of them are common to other areas of the Roman Empire; often, it is cited that Fortunatianus, the bishop of Aquileia 342 – 357 AD, wrote a commentary to the Gospel in sermo rusticus (the common/ language), which, therefore, would have been quite divergent from the standard Latin of administration. The text itself did not survive so its language cannot be examined, but its attested existence testifies to a shift of languages while, for example, other important communities of Northern Italy were still speaking Latin. The language spoken before the arrival of the Romans in 181 BC was of Celtic origin since the inhabitants belonged to the Carni, a Celtic population. In modern Friulian, the words of Celtic origins are many (terms referring to mountains, woods, plants, animals, inter alia) and much influence of the original population is shown in toponyms (names of villages with -acco, -icco). Even influences from the Lombardic language - Friuli was one of their strongholds - are very frequent. In a similar manner, there are unique connections to the modern, nearby Lombard language. In Friulian, there are also a plethora of words of German, Slovenian and Venetian origin. From that evidence, scholars today agree that the formation of Friulian dates back to circa 1000 AD, at the same time as other dialects derived from Latin (see Vulgar Latin). The first written records of Friulian have been found in administrative acts of the 13th century, but the documents became more frequent