The article aims to provide a linguistic analysis of the language testified in a Nineteenth-century manuscript written in the alpine community of Sauris/Zahre, a German language island in northern Friuli. We show that the manuscript must have been written in the first half of the century, contrary to what generally supposed; through the analysis of some more significant phenomena we show that, in spite
of a pervasive adaptation to the characteristics of Sauris German phonology, the language of the manuscript is highly influenced by standard German, with only few characteristic morphological features emerging as documenting that properties of the nowadays language were already existing when the text was written.
