Isolated ethnic or cultural entities remaining in Europe

I'm not an anthropologist, so I don't want to call these groups by an Anglicized or wrong name (or to enter a political minefield), so I thought it best just to provide a wiki entry for both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sámi_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people

In the Dolomites, we stayed at a lovely hotel in Ortisei and the owners spoke Ladin. The older relatives did not speak English although their children did. It is spoken in several of the Northern Italian provinces on the Austrian and Swiss borders.

As Agnes brings up, ethnic groups in Europe can be a potential political minefield, for example are Silesians a separate cultural/ethnic entity with a distinct language, or a dialect of Polish? Some Silesians consider themselves to be a distinct nationality within Poland, which has given rise to a Silesian Independence movement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesian_Autonomy_Movement. Being from Barcelona, I know all too well how ethnic identities are manipulated and used by local politicians for their own gains.

You may want to look at the Pyrenees, so wild and beautiful, the small towns and villages there feel like they are in a time warp. Because of the natural isolation of these mountains you'll find 7 languages spoken in and around the Pyrenees, some very old indeed. One such is Aranese, located in northern Catalonia, but distinct from Catalan language.

Well, to some, Quebeqois may be considered a distinct language 🤣 (I had to do it).....

Thanks folks. I recognize the Romani and Sami, who are relatively well-known, and I know there are many different peoples, tribes and linguistic groups in eastern Russia. Ladin is a new one on me, and thats what I was looking for. Thanks Carlos for the tip on Silesians, and the Aranese. I'm not trying to delve into the politics, just interested in the small bits of history and culture that are out of the mainstream. The val Resia sounds like an incredible place to visit, for example, and having contact with that kind of "cultural backdoor" (please forgive me for saying that) catches my interest.

Yeah, I think Quebec is pretty cool too.

I know a place where they still speak Alsatian ............. not surprising, but it's in Texas.

Sort of along the lines of what you are talking about might be the Bektashis in Albania and North Macedonia (and I guess elsewhere). Its actually a Muslim religious sect, but they have their own culture and have been in the area for hundreds of years. The locals often pointed them out as "we do this here, except for them, they do that ...."

Oh, and there is a book, Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor where he describes walking from the UK to Istanbul just prior to WW2. In it he describes dozens of ethnicities he encounters along the way; many just in Hungary. Most of which I had never heard of before and I fear may not have survived the war or the following occupation. Really fantastic read.

It can certainly be a mine field, but if you approach it with care you will be probably be fine.

The Sami is as mentioned an ethnic group living mostly in Norway and Sweden, with pretty large numbers in Finland and Russia as well. They have been treated pretty bad historically, but things have improved and there has been a "resurgence" (for lack of a better word) in Sami culture in the last decades. Both traditional, and more modern. Artists Sofia Jannok and Jon-Henrik Fjällgren and others have released music in Sami with joik incorporated in the lyrics. Sami handicraft have also become more popular.

Another interesting minority are the Basque in northern Spain and southern France. Their language, also known as Basque (or in Basque, Euskara) is an isolate language not related to any other known language and is the only pre-Indo-European language in Western Europe.

One cultural group that has been almost eliminated is the "auslander Deutsch" group. In Romania, there were 7 "Saxon" towns, settled in the 1300s by Saxons. A ethnic Germanic presence was part of Romania until 1945. My own g-g-g-grandparents were "auslander Deutsch" or "Donau Schwaben" settlers in N Serbia in 1784. German settlers in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Belorus, and Russia were expelled in 1945-1947, as the German diaspora was destroyed following the war. Some remain - 1000 of 25,000 in Konigsburg Romania (now Brasov) are still there. But this was a huge part of each of these countries.

All good stuff. Thank you. James E, I figured the Balkans were a likely place for finding isolated groups. “The Basque History of the World” By Mark Kurlansky is a great book worth reading whether you're interested in the region or not.

There are a lot of variations on both Basques and Occitans when you look into the details, one of my favorites being Gascogne (because of Cyrano and d'Artagnan, etc.) The high valleys, like the one that Pau is in, are calling to me like a siren :-)

Inbetween Asturias and Aquitane is the Duchy of Vasconia, like so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Gascony

The Basque areas of northern Spain and Southern France are worth a visit.

Also, Galicia in NW Spain is a Celtic area were people play the bagpipes and wear kilts.

The Albanian people were the original people in the SW Balkans before the slavs moved into the area.

Places in the Middle East like Armenia (First Christian country) and Georgia might be interesting.

I grew up in an ethnically diverse neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, plenty of Poles, Ukes and many others. We were one of the mangia-cake families. Welsh mother and grandparents: my father, a Finn, a mangia-cake by association.

As far as I know, Lemkos consider themselves to be either Polish or Ukrainian, Hutsuls (a family friend) usually Ukrainian. There are also Galicians (my wife's deceased grandmother) in western Ukraine/eastern Poland, as opposed to geovagriffith's bag pipe playing ones in Spain. I think Geordies in England should be considered an isolated etnic group, I have no idea what language they speak.

There might be a few thousand Yiddish speakers in Europe. Not sure if this counts because they are probably not isolated.

What about Frisian- , spoken in parts of the Netherla do and Germany? What about the Celtics languages - Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, Welsh, Bretton in France? What about Faroese and Icelandic?

What about Scotts in Scottland? It is similar to Middle English and almost intelligible to English speakers with blips of unintelligibility every few sentences. I once listened or tried listening to a speech about Scots, spoken in Scots, on YouTube.

Yiddish, depending on your source is spoken by 1 to 3 million with only a very small minority of those using it as their primary language. Prior to the holocaust the number was over 10 million.

Some sources say 450,000 Hasidic Jews speak Yiddish regularly. The number of non Hasidic and secular speakers is probably much lower. I went to Lithuania for a Yiddish class in 2007 - at one of the sponsored activities, the president of a (small) organized Jewish community may have addressed us - he was over 80, but then a guy who was about 25 at the time talked to us in Yiddish - he explained how he did most of the president's job, talked to media (in Lithuanian) when necessary, and so on.

There may be a dialect continuum in Scotland, with some native Scottish people usually speaking standard British English, some usually speaking full Scots, and most switching between talking with more more Scot-like speech with some listeners, and talking closer to standard British English with other listeners.

Thanks for the additional input. I guess its not minority languages I'm interested in, but rather places you could visit that were enclaves of peoples still maintaining old and obscure cultural ethnic identities. Keeping a distinction between ethnicity, national identity, and language, its the geographic isolation and customs that makes a difference. Clearly Icelandic and Welsh speakers have whole countries and Yiddish and Gaelic cultures are not exactly obscure. But Frisian is one I had not been aware of. I know there are hundreds of local and regional dialects, but geographic places that show remnants of another culture, like the road signs in the Engadine (Switzerland) with Romansch place names, is what I was getting at. Something bigger and older than ethnic neighborhoods in cities.

Russia has or at least used to have 135 languages. The Caucasus region has a lot of languages too... Also what about:

Upper and lower Sorbian in Eastern Germany,

Catalonia, and Catalan and Valencian language in Spain.

Provencial language in Southern France,

Northwest Spain: Although there is the Galician language which is supposed to be 85% the same as Portuguese, the native population may be Celtic;

Kashubian- in Poland,

Low German in Northern Germany,

Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian seem to have survived even though the countries were owned by the Soviet Union.

Hungarian and Estonian are not Indo-European languages. They are in the Fino-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family - other little-known related Fino-Ugric and Uralic languages may still be spoken in parts of Russia. Also in Hungarian names, the surname is first, the given name or forename is second, the opposite of the rest of Europe.

Griko. There are 2 communities left in Southern Italy ( in the heel and the toe), but their language and culture derive from the Greek habitation of the area for centuries. Supposedly, culturally, they are pretty much assimilated into Italian culture, but the language is holding on...barely. May be worth a little more research.

Ladin is spoken in a few valleys in South Tyrol and Trentino; it is somewhat similar to Romansch (that shares the same feature of being a little different in each valley) and to Friulano (the zone around Udine) - all these languages go back to a time before German populations settled the same areas in the Alps.

Italy has several ethnic minorities. For example, some Christians fled Albania in 15th century when Ottomans invaded their country and islamized it; their descendants settled in a lot of separate places in South Italy, usually places that have a reference to Albania in their name, and they still speak the language (or, should I say, they spoke it till the last but one generation). A group of them, centered around Lungro, Calabria, still have byzantine church rites in spite of giving allegiance to Catholic church and having a dioceses on their own, in which (Catholic) priests can marry and have a family.

Other minorities are Catalans in Alghero, Sardinia, and Cimbri, a German group around Asiago, Veneto.

The Walser, a German community from Switzerland, colonized isolated valleys all over the Alps in 12th century and there are many instances of their presence.

This is actually a fascinating thread.

[REPLYING TO: Paul-of-the-Frozen-North

One cultural group that has been almost eliminated is the "auslander Deutsch" group. In Romania, there were 7 "Saxon" towns, settled in the 1300s by Saxons. A ethnic Germanic presence was part of Romania until 1945. My own g-g-g-grandparents were "auslander Deutsch" or "Donau Schwaben" settlers in N Serbia in 1784. German settlers in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Belorus, and Russia were expelled in 1945-1947, as the German diaspora was destroyed following the war. Some remain - 1000 of 25,000 in Konigsburg Romania (now Brasov) are still there. But this was a huge part of each of these countries.]

Romania's current President, Klaus Iohannis, is an auslander Deutsch descendent (Neamţ in Romanian) from Sibiu (formerly, Hermannstadt - the largest of the 7 Saxon towns). Iohannis' 2014 election was largely fueled by the 4 million Romanian ex-pats voting from abroad and hoping to oust corruption.

In addition to the Neamţ, Hungarian, Roma and various border minorities from surrounding countries, Romania has the interesting Szekely Land, which consists of two counties that have a super-majority Szekelys population (Hungarian subgroup). Szekely Land is situated on the eastern edge of Transylvania, where the Szekelys were the frontier guards that defended the borders of the Hungary/Transylvania from the 1400s. The Szekely identify as Hungarian, but have a distinct ethnic identity and dialect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C3%A9kely_Land

If you want to delve even deeper into the Szekelys history, there is a separate group identified as the "Szekely of Bukovina," which migrated from Szekely Land to Bukovina in northern Romania/southern Ukraine in the 1700s to protest forced military service by the Hapsburg Monarchy...The Szekely of Bukovina suffered oppression and poverty. Many were resettled in the Banat region of southwestern Romania in the late 1800s and then the entire remainder of the community migrated again in 1940 to Vojvodina, Serbia. The majority moved again to Tolna County, Hungary after the War. Today, there are remnant communities in Hunedoara, Romania, Vojvodina, Serbia and Tolna, Hungary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C3%A9kelys_of_Bukovina