Rhaeto-Romance is distinguished by a number of features which separate it from its neighbors.

The name "Rhaeto-Romance" refers to the former Roman province of Rhaetia.

Rhaetian language, an unrelated language spoken in ancient times around the area where Rhaeto-Romance is now spoken.

Rhaeto-Romance can be classified as Gallo-Romance, or as a branch of the Western Romance languages.

It has been suggested that a surviving relic of the Raeti's Latin speech is the Romansh language, one of the so-called "Rhaeto-Romance languages".

Rhaeto-Romance, or Rhaetian, is a traditional subfamily of the Romance languages that is spoken in north and north-eastern Italy and in Switzerland.

Rhaeto-Romance is a diverse group, with the Italian varieties influenced by Venetan and Italian and Romansh by Franco-Provençal.

This theory gained a large circulation with the publications of the Austrian linguist Theodor Gartner, who, however, used Rhaeto-Romance instead of Ladin as an umbrella term.

He has done fieldwork on the Hua language of Papua New-Guinea and has published on Khmer, Rhaeto-Romance and Germanic linguistics.

Whether or not Romansh, Friulan and Ladin should compose a separate "Rhaeto-Romance" subgroup within Gallo-Romance is an unresolved issue, known as the Questione ladina.

During that period, the population of the coastal area, which had spoken various Romance dialects (either of Rhaeto-Romance or Istriot origin) adopted the Venetian dialect of Italian.

Its name (Dreiländerspitze means peak of three countries) refers to a meeting point between the territories of three ancient tribes (Rhaeto-Romance or Romansch, Bavarii and Alamanni) and their languages.

Phylogenetically, there is disagreement about what languages should be considered within the Iberian Romance group; for example, some authors consider that East Iberian, also called Occitano-Romance, could be more closely related to languages of northern Italy (or also Franco-Provençal, the langues d'oïl and Rhaeto-Romance).