Dalmatian language

Almost every city developed its own dialect. Most of these became extinct before they were recorded, so the only trace of these ancient dialects is some words borrowed into local dialects of today's Croatia and Montenegro.[6]

Areas of Dalmatian dialects.

Dalmatian evolved from the vulgar Latin of the Illyro-Romans. It was spoken on the Dalmatian coast from Fiume (now Rijeka) as far south as Cattaro (Kotor) in Montenegro. Speakers lived mainly in the coastal towns of Jadera (Zadar), Tragurium (Trogir), Spalatum[9] (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 that are known of were Vegliot, a northern dialect spoken on the island of Curicta, and Ragusan, a southern dialect spoken in and around Ragusa (Dubrovnik).

The oldest preserved documents written in Dalmatian are 13th century inventories in Ragusa (Dubrovnik). Dalmatian is also known from two Ragusan letters, dated 1325 and 1397. 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, Rector of the republic of Ragusa in the 1430s. The earliest reference to the Dalmatian language dates from the tenth century and it has been estimated that about 50,000 people spoke it at that time.[10] After the loss of Ragusa, Dalmatian was no longer the language of any urban center, and it developed no written tradition. Udaina's Vegliote is considerably influenced by Venetian, which was in fact his native language—his "Vegliote" was in fact his recollection of the language he had once spoken with his long-deceased grandmother, and had grown up hearing his parents speaking.[10]

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(origin of the Iadera dialect) shows strong influence from Venetian, the language that after years under Venetian rule superseded Iadera and other dialects of Dalmatian. Other dialects met their demise with the settlement of populations of Slavic speakers.

Extinction

Tuone Udaina, the last speaker of Dalmatian

In 1897, the scholar Matteo Bartoli, himself a native of nearby Istria, visited Tuone Udaina (Italian: Antonio Udina), the last speaker of any Dalmatian dialect, to study his language, writing down approximately 2,800 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.

Just one year later, on 10 June 1898, Tuone Udaina was accidentally killed at 74 in a roadwork explosion.[11][12]

In the most recent classification from 2017 it was classified by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History with the Istriot language in the Dalmatian Romance subgroup.[1]

It was once thought to be a language that bridged the gap between Romanian and Italian, but it was only distantly related to the nearby Romanian dialects, such as the nearly extinct Istro-Romanian spoken in nearby Istria, Croatia.

Some of its features are quite archaic. Dalmatian is the only Romance language that has palatalised /k/ and /ɡ/ before /i/, but not before /e/ (all the others have palatalised them in both situations, except Sardinian, which has not palatalised them at all[13]): Latin: civitate > Vegliot: cituot ("city"), Latin: cenare > Vegliot: kenur ("to dine").

Some Dalmatian words have been preserved as borrowings in South Slavic languages, in Chakavian and the Dubrovnik dialect of Shtokavian.

An analytic trend can be observed in Dalmatian: nouns and adjectives began to lose their gender and number inflexions, the noun declension disappeared completely, and the verb conjugations began to follow the same path, but the verb maintained a person and number distinction except in the third person (in common with Romanian and several languages of Italy).

The definite article precedes the noun, unlike in the Eastern Romance languages like Romanian, which have it postposed to the noun.

Dalmatian kept Latin words related to urban life, lost in Romanian (or if preserved, not with the original sense), such as cituot "city" (in modern Romanian) cetate means "fortress"; compare also Albanian qytet, borrowed from Latin, which, too, means "city"). The Dalmatians retained an active urban society in their city-states, whereas most Romanians were driven into small mountain settlements during the Great Migrations of 400 to 800 AD.[17]

Venetian became a major influence on the language as Venetian commercial influence grew. The Chakavian dialect and Dubrovnik Shtokavian dialect of Croatian, which were spoken outside the cities since the immigration of the Slavs, gained importance in the cities by the 16th century, and it eventually replaced Dalmatian as the day-to-day language. Nevertheless, some words were loaned into coastal Croatian varieties:

• Dubrovnik: CL antemna > otijemna "sail pole"; columna > kelomna "pillar, column"; ficatum > pìkat "liver"; lucerna > lùk(i)jerna "oil lamp"; lixivum > lìksija "lye"; oculata > úkljata "black-tail sparus, Sparus melanurus"; recessa > rèkesa "ebb tide";
• Standard Croatian: arbor(em) > jȃrbor, jarbol (Slovenian jambor) "mast"; aurata > òvrata, obrata "gilt-head bream"; canaba > kònoba "(wine) cellar, cellar bar"; lolligo, -inem > òliganj, lȉganj, lȉgnja "squid"; margo, -inem > mr̀gin(j), mrganj "furrow or ditch marking a border"; tracta > trakta "dragnet, trawl", etc.[18]

As Dalmatian was mainly an oral language, there is not much literature preserved in it; only some fragments collected in a book by Antonio Ive and a few unpublished texts in archives still unknown to the public. But there are some works written in revived Dalmatian, as, for example, the short poetry book "Adi la raipa de mi jeuntut".

The following are examples of the Lord's Prayer in Latin, Dalmatian, Friulian, Italian, Istro-Romanian, Romanian, and Spanish:

Since the beginning of the 21st century, some enthusiasts have tried to revitalize Dalmatian (Vegliot dialect) through the net.[19][20]

• Istriot language
• Chakavian
• Dalmatian city-states

• Bartoli, Matteo Giulio. (1906). Das Dalmatische: Altromanische Sprachreste von Veglia bis Ragusa und ihre Stellung in der Apennino-balkanischen Romania. 2 vols. Vienna: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften.
  • Italian translation: Il Dalmatico: Resti di un'antica lingua romanza parlata da Veglia a Ragusa e sua collocazione nella Romània appennino-balcanica. Trans. Aldo Duro. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000.
• Fisher, John. (1975). Lexical Affiliations of Vegliote. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 0-8386-7796-7.
• Hadlich, Roger L. (1965). The phonological history of Vegliote, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press
• Maiden, Martin. "Dalmatian", in The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, eds. Adam Ledgeway & Martin Maiden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 126–38.
• Price, Glanville. (2000). Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-22039-9.
• Ive, Antonio. L' Antico dialetto di Veglia

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Dalmatian language.

• Dalmatian basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database