For instance, in Dutch the species is rotspatrijs, in German – Felsenhenne, in French – poulette de roche – all literal translations of "rock partridge".

Nonetheless, although this species' range does not naturally overlap with that of its relatives, they co-occur where they have been introduced as gamebirds, for example in North America, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Russia, and in southeastern France where red-legged partridges have been released.

These probably crossed the Adriatic via a land-bridge during the last ice age, to become isolated only with the sea levels rising at the beginning of the Holocene c.12.000–10.000 years ago, with Alpine birds much less contributing to the Apennines population (Randi 2006).

Apennine birds are not consistently recognizable by external morphology, and are only weakly differentiated with regards to mtDNA D-loop and hypervariable control region sequences and microsatellite genotyping.

As they nonetheless constitute a discrete subpopulation evolving towards subspecies status, their population numbers could arguably deserve monitoring (Randi 2006).