This included Sarganserland (now Canton of St. Gallen), as far as Lake Walen and the Linth River, the Ill basin in what is now Vorarlberg, and the upper Vinschgau in what is now South Tyrol.

Rhaeto-Romance linguistic unity broke down from the end of the Carolingian period, with the establishment of the imperial counties of Werdenberg and Tyrol to the north and east, and the March of Verona to the south.

In the mid-8th century a surviving Lex Romana Curiensis, a "Roman Law of Chur", was an abbreviated epitome of the Breviary of Alaric.

In the high medieval period, with the advance of Alemannic Germans, the linguistic boundary of Latin (Romance) speakers was pushed back to what became Grisons (the Three Leagues).

Sutsilvan is now limited to some 1,000 speakers concentrated in a language island on the left bank of the Posterior Rhine, centered on Casti-Wergenstein (the former Schams subdistrict).

In 1937, the Swiss government proposed recognizing Romansh as Switzerland's fourth national language (alongside German, French and Italian).

The political background for this was the irredentist propaganda by Fascist Italy, which claimed Grisons along with the Ticino as ethnically Italian territory.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, debate about Switzerland's role in what became the European Union prompted a reawakening of "the long-dormant Romansh national movement".

As of 2000, areas with a majority of native Rumantsch speakers were separated into four disconnected parts: Surselva (Sursilvan, Tuatschin), Schams (Sutsilvan), Albula/Surmeir (Surmiran) and Engadin with Val Mustair (Putèr, Vallader, Jauer).