In the small villages of Acquaviva Collecroce and Montemitro, in Molise, fewer than a thousand people speak a language quite distant from Italian: Molise Croatian.
Originally, it was born from the union of a group of Slavic people fleeing the Dalmatian coast of the Balkan Peninsula with the local inhabitants, who lived in settlements struck by an earthquake and a plague in the second half of the 15th century.

The language managed to survive esclusively in oral trasmission, and became noticeably separate from the original Croatian language, taking on new shapes and features even between the two villages.
We interviewed and portrayed many inhabitants in their favored settings both in Acquaviva and Montemitro, from old farmers to younger people struggling to preserve their linguistic inheritance. In these villages, hardly hit by depopulation, two identities have sprouted separately, but both of them are waning and slowly disappearing.