Distribution of surnames and identities in the Ladin communities of the Dolomites

The structure of surnames of some communities of the Dolomitic area with a relevant component of the Ladin language is compared with each other and with other communities of the neighbourhood, in which no Ladin idiom is found. This investigation, which tries to evaluate the presence of a cultural and behavioural identity of the Ladin populations, starts from the assumption that a community of surnames is equivalent to a common cultural origin maintained by a reciprocal mobility. The analyses that have been carried out using estimates of the similarities between populations, the topological representations obtained by them and the spatial autocorrelation, show no evidence of the presence of a higher similarity between the populations that share Ladin traditions and idiom, nor the presence of preferential exchanges between them and not even the process of undifferentiated diffusion along all the directions. They show instead in the geographical collocation, in the belonging to the same province or to the same valley, the phenomenon that has more influence on the similarity between populations and the mobility of individuals, thus indicating that these are the factors which mostly cause the exchange between populations.