In 1898, the last speaker of the little-known Dalmatian language died in a railroad accident, the final act in the language’s millennium-long decline. Although it had clung onto life for so long, the Dalmatian language had been caught between two much larger rivals, the prestige language of the Adriatic, Italian, and the numerically-superior Slavic dialects of the Balkan interior. The story of Dalmatian’s decline extends back into the Middle Ages, as its small number of speakers, perhaps no more than 50,000 at its height, was overwhelmed by stronger and more numerous neighbors.
The Language of the Town
Map by Bogdan Giusca. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
When the Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century AD, Slavic-speaking tribes entered the Balkans and established their own kingdoms. Latin speakers fled in the face of their conquests, taking shelter in the the coastal cities of the Adriatic, such as Jadera (Zara/Zadar), Vecla (Veglia/Krk), and most importantly, Ragusa (Dubrovnik), which remained under protection of Byzantium. The Slavonic languages (today known as Bosno-Serbo-Croatian) became the majority language of the Balkan interior, while the cities remained fortresses of the Latin language. As a result of these population redistributions, Dalmatian became firmly entrenched as the language of the region’s cultured urban elite and their subjects, who held on to their Roman inheritance and looked west towards Italy for their high culture, rather than toward the Balkans, which remained an intellectual and cultural backwater even after the Slavs’ adoption of Christianity.
Dalmatia’s Demographic Swamping
Although the Dalmatian language found a secure home in coastal urban areas, the expansion of Venice and Croatia on one hand, and the reality of Medieval life on the other, resulted in its gradual replacement with Croatian and Italian. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance were violent eras, where the trifecta of famine, war, and disease was commonplace. Cities were frequently sacked, while malnutrition, cramped living quarters, and contaminated water led to fatal outbreaks of disease. The Dalmatian coast suffered all of these, including Venetian and Slavic pirate attacks on cities such as Zara and Ragusa, the Black Death, and in Ragusa, a massive earthquake that killed over half the city’s inhabitants in 1667. The local nobility had to turn towards the interior of Dalmatia for solutions. Cities such as Ragusa and Spalato (Split) imported large numbers of Slavic-speaking migrants to repopulate their cities and provide human capital after such events. As early as the 12th century, the lower classes of the Dalmatian towns were increasingly Slavicized, and by the 15th century, Slavic dialects had become the majority languages in many of these towns. In an attempt to stem the loss of Dalmatian, the Ragusan senate banned the official use of Slavic languages in favor of Latin, Dalmatian, or Italian, the latter of which had become fashionable among the upper classes.
La Bella Lingua
As Slavic dialects slowly displaced Dalmatian speakers among the common people, Italian began to displace Dalmatian among the local nobility. Italian merchants from Venice, Tuscany, and Southern Italy had settled in Dalmatia since the 9th century (and perhaps earlier), especially in Ragusa. These Italian arrivals intermarried with the Dalmatian nobility and their descendants abandoned Dalmatian in favor of Florentine Tuscan. This dialect, which alter formed the basis of the “proper” Italian language, was quickly becoming the prestige vernacular of the Middle Ages alongside Latin. Italy’s incredible cultural output during the Renaissance accelerated this trend, as did the Venetian conquest of the Dalmatian Stato de Mar in the 15th century. The dominance of Italy-Dalmatian families in Ragusa is reflected in names of the elite families, such as Gondola, Ghetaldi, Caboga, Zamagna, Vetrani, and Cerva. Dalmatian found itself unable to resist the encroachment at the elite level, and by the 19th century, had been relegated to a minority language of a handful of fishermen in its own homeland.
Matteo Bartoli and Burbur
By the 19th century, Austrian rule had ensured Croatian’s status as lingua franca in Dalmatia, reducing the Romance-speaking populations to a minority through forced assimilation and emigration in most places except Zara. While Italian still thrived among the upper classes, Dalmatian had been reduced to the language of a few small villages on the barrier islands off the Adriatic coast, particularly on the island of Veglia. When Italian linguist Matteo Bartoli sought information on Dalmatian in 1897, he could only find a single individual that remembered any substantial amount of it. His source was an itinerant laborer named Tuone Udaina (It. Antonio Udina), known to his friends and relatives as burbur (perhaps “barber”). However, Udaina was not a fluent speaker of Dalmatian. His primary language was Italian; he had learned Dalmatian as a child from his parents, but had not spoken it for at least two decades. Nevertheless, Bartoli managed to record some valuable pieces of the dialect of Veglia, including stories, sayings, monologues, and around 2,800 words in his book Il Dalmatico.
Aftermath
Today, we have seen many languages die peacefully, as the last speakers pass on from old age. Dalmatian, however, did not enjoy such a peaceful end. On June 10th, 1898, the Dalmatian language met a fiery and violent death when Udaina stepped on a land mine and was blown to pieces. The last remaining vestiges of living Dalmatian died with him. It is highly unlikely that the language would have survived his death had he lived longer, although perhaps there would have been other opportunities to record further material. Dalmatian’s close relative, Italian, was then expunged from the region after the Second World War at the hands of the Yugoslav partisans, completing the de-Latinization of the region begun in the Middle Ages. Although Dalmatian has been extinct for over a century, the Roman legacy pervades almost every aspect of the region’s culture, food, language, architecture, customs, religion, and history. Many of these originated among the Italo-Dalmatian urban elite culture that dominated Dalmatia’s cities until 1947. Thanks to Bartoli’s efforts, we are fortunate enough to possess some samples, which have allowed this beautiful and unique tongue, a poorly-known gem of the Adriatic, to be passed down to our modern ears.
Sources and Further Reading
Matteo Bartoli’s book was published in German as Das Dalmatische and had to be re-translated into Italian after the original book was lost. It is available through university libraries, but virtually impossible to find otherwise. For the history of the individual Dalmatian states and the linguistic interplay between Dalmatian, Italian, Venetian, and Croatian, it is best to examine each city-state separately.
For a spoken sample of the languages there is this lovely video of the Our Father in Dalmatian (all credit to the ILoveLanguages! channel on YouTube).