Caspar Decurtins publishes 'Chanzuns Popularas' as part of the Rätoromanische Chrestomathie, collecting Romansh folk songs from Swiss Grisons valleys—Sursilvan, Vallader, Puter. The anthology preserves fables of Alps spirits (salvans, muntanellas), seasonal transhumance rituals, cattle magic, and medieval Räto-Romanic folklore, using rhyming quatrains and yodel-like refrain structures. The collection arrests language decline from Germanization.

Decurtins' collection fueled 20th-century Romansh literary revival, inspiring poets (Peider Lansel, Andri Peer) to write original poetry in folk meters (décasyllabe, eight-syllable couplet) against Romansh's marginalization as a 'peasant dialect.' The chanzuns' folk forms—with their Alpine spirit vocabulary and transhumance imagery—provided models for Swiss minority-language poetry asserting cultural autonomy. The tradition proves how mountain pastoral folklore, dismissed as backwards, can generate modern resistant poetics in endangered languages.