Dalmatian Language - History

History

The Roman Republic gradually came to occupy the territory of Illyria between 229 and 155 BC. Merchants and authorities settling from Rome brought with them the Latin language, and eventually the indigenous inhabitants mostly abandoned their languages (prevalently a variety of Illyrian tongues) for vulgar Latin. After the Roman capital moved to Constantinople, Greek began to replace Latin as the Lingua Franca in the empire (eventually becoming official in 620), but Illyrian towns continued to speak Latin (see Illyro-Roman), which evolved over time into regional dialects and eventually into distinct Romance languages.

Dalmatian was spoken on the Dalmatian coast from Fiume (now Rijeka) as far south as Cottora (Kotor) in Montenegro. Speakers lived mainly in the coastal towns of Jadera (Zadar), Tragurium (Trogir), Spalatum (Split), Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and Acruvium (Kotor), and also on the islands of Curicta (Krk), Crepsa (Cres) and Arba (Rab). Almost every city developed its own dialect, but the most important dialects we know of were Vegliot, a northern dialect spoken on the island of Curicta, and Ragusan, a southern dialect spoken in and around Ragusa (Dubrovnik).

The Dalmatian dialect of Ragusa is known from two letters, dated 1325 and 1397, as well as from other mediaeval texts. The oldest preserved documents written in Dalmatian are 13th century inventories in Ragusan. The available sources include roughly 260 Ragusan words. Surviving words include pen ("bread"), teta ("father"), chesa ("house") and fachir ("to do"), which were quoted by the Dalmatian, Filippo Diversi, the head of school of Ragusa in the 1430s. The earliest reference to the Dalmatian language dates from the tenth century and it is estimated that about 50,000 people spoke it at that time, though the main source of this information, the Italian linguist Matteo Bartoli, may have exaggerated his figures.

Dalmatian was influenced particularly heavily by Venetian and Croatian (despite the latter, the Latin roots of Dalmatian remained prominent). A 14th-century letter from Zadar (origin of the Iadera dialect) shows strong influence from Venetian, the language that after years under Venetian rule extinguished Iadera and other dialects of Dalmatian. Other dialects met their demise with the settlement of populations of Slavic speakers.

The last speaker of any Dalmatian dialect was Burbur Tuone Udaina (Italian: Antonio Udina), who was accidentally killed in an explosion on June 10, 1898. His language was studied by the scholar Matteo Bartoli, himself a native of nearby Istria, who visited him in 1897 and wrote down approximately two thousand eight hundred words, stories, and accounts of his life, which were published in a book that has provided much information on the vocabulary, phonology, and grammar of the language. Bartoli wrote in Italian and published a translation in German (Das Dalmatische) in 1906. The Italian language manuscripts were reportedly lost, and the work was not re-translated into Italian until 2001.