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Dalmatian language   This language existed until the end of the 19th century, when in 1898 its last speaker died. It used to be spoken on the Adriatic shores of nowadays Croatia and on the along islands. There were two dialects of it: Vegliotian in the north and Ragusan in the south. We believe the language was in use since Roman colonists came here in the last centuries BC, but the first mentioning about it in linguistic literature appeared only in 1842, later all dialects were recorded, and linguists found several documents written in it in archives of Dubrovnik (former Ragusa).

The structure of it was fully West Romance. Numerous phonetic interchanges (kenur "to dine" - kaina "dinner") existed in it, which cannot be found neither in Italian, nor in Balkano-Romance languages. Dalmatian was moving towards analytization: nouns and adjectives were losing their gender and number inflections, though verbs preserved masculine and feminine, singular and plural. The definite article was used like a preposition (compare Romanian and Aromanian: a postposition article). The noun declension completely disappeared, and verb conjugation started to do the same.

Dalmatian vocabulary contains the majority of words from Latin origin, though the percentage of Slavic (Serbo-Croatian) words is rather high as well. The language used the Latin alphabet with some diacritical marks.
 

Dalmatian Links