Dalmatian

Dalmatian was a Romance language of the eastern Adriatic coast, in the historical region of Dalmatia in what is now Croatia. Descended from the Latin once spoken along that shore, it occupied an unusual position within the Romance family, standing between the Italo-Romance languages to the west and the Eastern Romance branch that includes Romanian. Its best-recorded variety was Vegliote, the dialect of the island of Veglia, today known by its Croatian name, Krk.

Dalmatian was squeezed for centuries between two stronger neighbors. Along the coast and in trade, Venetian and Italian carried prestige and commercial weight; in the hinterland and increasingly in the towns, Croatian — a Slavic language — dominated daily life. Caught between them, Dalmatian gradually lost ground in a slow process of language shift, retreating to a few coastal and island communities until it survived only in scattered, aging speakers.

By the late nineteenth century the language had essentially one remaining link to its past: Tuone Udaina, known by the nickname Burbur, on the island of Veglia. He was not a fluent native speaker in the ordinary sense; he had learned the language as a child from listening to his parents, had not used it conversationally for some twenty years, and was elderly, deaf, and toothless when scholars reached him. Yet he was the principal source for the linguist Matteo Bartoli, who recorded what he could remember.

Udaina was killed on 10 June 1898 by an explosion during road construction. With his death, Dalmatian is generally considered to have become extinct. Bartoli’s documentation, published in 1906, preserved a substantial body of words, texts, and grammar, ensuring that a language already nearly gone would not vanish without trace.