Name: Carl

Country and Region: GA, Marietta

Native Language: English

Student or Teacher: Student

Age or Grade: junior

 

Subject of Question: Dalmatian Language

 

Question:

I need to find out the exact date of when the last person to speak the Dalmatian language died....I know it was in 1898 by a land mind but I want to know the EXACT date.

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Dear Carl:

 

Hello.  I am writing you on behalf of Ask-A-Linguistic-Tutor in response to your 1/28/01 question.  Antonio Udina (the Italian version of Tuone Udaina-his real name) was the last speaker of Dalmatian, an extinct Romance language once spoken on the coast of Croatia.  According to “Das Dalmatische: altromanische Sprachreste von Veglia bis Ragusa und ihre Stellung in der Apennino-Balkanischen Romania,” a book by the Italian linguist Matteo Bartoli, Udina died June 10th, 1898, at around 6:30 p.m.   The following is an excerpt from Encyclopedia Britannica:

 

“He was the main source of knowledge for his parents' dialect (that of the island of Veglia [modern Krk], though he was hardly an ideal informant; Vegliot Dalmatian was not his native language, and he had learned it only from listening to his parents' private conversations. Moreover, he had not spoken the language for 20 years at the time he acted as an informant, and he was deaf and toothless as well. Most of the other evidence for Dalmatian derives from documents from Zara (modern Zadar) and Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) dating to the 13th-16th centuries. It is possible that, apart from isolated pockets, the language was then replaced by Croatian and, to a lesser extent, by Venetian (a dialect of Italian). It is certain, even from scanty evidence, that Dalmatian was a language in its own right, noticeably different from other Romance languages.”

Here are some web sites worth checking out just for fun:

 

1.)    http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/6502/ = New Dalmatian Web Page

2.)    http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/8/0,5716,118108+4,00.html

= Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry for it.

 

Sincerely,

Andrew Pollak

Ask-A-Linguistic-Tutor