The original dialect remained more or less pure for a number of centuries and was still well-conserved up until the mid1800s. A number of factors brought about a progressive decline and having traversed a plurilinguistic situation during the first decades of the twentieth century it is now almost extinct.

Today not more than fifteen people out of a resident population of 450 inhabitants still speak tîtcu.These are mostly women between the ages of seventy and eighty, who use it in their colloquial language , for example when they meet on the street and in one case to pray. These same speakers admit that because of their restricted use of the language they have forgotten many terms.Their children generally understand it but can only say a few words and even then with uncertain pronunciation.

The study of the causes of the decline of the dialect must take into consideration one very obvious reason. As we are dealing with a linguistic island, its survival depended on a lack of intercourse with the surrounding Italian context on the one hand, and on the other a continuation of contacts, especially of a commercial–economic nature with the other German communities.

In the seventeenth century the D’Adda family used outside miners to exploit the gold mine of Alagna. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Valsesia passed from the State of Lombardy to the Savoia and this had indirect but important repercussions on the language. The mining industry received a new impulse which brought about renewed immigration and this altered the ethnic composition of the village. The miners actually formed a sub-community. Added to this Alagna emigration, which had been traditionally towards Germanic countries, now became orientated towards Savoie and France. This emigration, traditionally male plasterers and stonemasons, but sometimes even couples or whole families was prevalently seasonal and therefore constituted a constant movement of people outside of the community. During the nineteenth century the growth of Alagna as an important alpine tourism resort at the foot of Monte Rosa and the progressive italianization of the Savoie state as well as the tendency of the children of the miners to marry outsiders created a greater opening to the surrounding world.

The German dialect still survived in the more isolated hamlets but appeared to be submerged in the central hamlets. So during the second half of the nineteenth century Alagna no longer had a priest who could speak the local dialect, a necessary condition for confessions . The use of German for religious services had already been forbidden, thus presumably everybody already knew Italian or one of its dialects. The use of Italian in school was also compulsory.

Therefore on the one hand the functional use of German was progressively declining and losing a great deal of its vocabulary, on the other hand there was a constant loss of speakers due to the marriages with outsiders . It has been observed that up until the WW2 years when both parents could speak the dialect there was every probability that it was transmitted to the children, while when only the mother spoke it and the context was favourable there was still a good prospect for the children to learn it; if only the father spoke it, the probabilities for the children also learning it appeared greatly reduced.

More recently the progressive loss of prestige of the dialect, passed down from the church to the school, has also entered the domestic environment, where the parents who usually speak the local idiom prefer to speak Italian to their children in order to facilitate their participation in the scholastic and social life.

Today in Alagna the rediscovery of the cultural patrimony of the past with its typical peculiarities of a unique ethno-linguistic identity cannot but recognize the fact that the language which has strongly characterized this community is definetely lost.

It’s practically impossible to hear the sound of the old language in the village except in the exhibitions of the folk group Die Walser im Land or in the dialect lessons held by a local person regularly every year.

There is still trace of the idiom in the toponomy: all the hamlets have German names and this is also true of the mountain farmhouses.