Who exactly these people were is difficult to say. Were they Illyrians, Etruscans, Celts, Rhaetians? What can be said with certainty is that in around 15 B.C. the various peoples of the Central Alps, all speaking different languages and belonging to different races, were subjected and forcibly united into the new Roman province Rhaetia by Drusus and Tiberius, stepsons of the Roman emperor Augustus. The following period of colonialisation by Rome, with the influx of soldiers, merchants, officials, new settlers and later of messengers of the faith saw the introduction of Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, into the new provinces.
The structure of this Latin, however, was modified by the original inhabitants who wove into it many of their own existing language structures, and the Ladin language evolved over many centuries to become an independent romance language around 450 A.D. The Ladin language is closely related to the other Romance languages which all have their origins in Latin but which were modified by the different subject peoples e.g. Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian.
It is almost certain that at one stage the whole of the Tyrol was Ladin. Even the name Tirol, formerly written Tyrol, could be an old Ladin name.
The migrations of the Germanic tribes after 400 A.D. stirred the relative calm of the Romance peoples living in the Alps, particularly the northward migration of the Langobards and the Southward migration of the Bavarians as from 500 A.D.
While German had become the dominating language in the main valleys by the 15th century, the Rhaeto-romance peoples, including the Ladins, could only survive intact in the remote valleys, among them Gardena (Gröden), and in this way they have managed to keep their own ancient language, thei costumes and even a special mentality, right through to the present day.