Tuone Udaina (or Antonio Udina in Italian) was the last native speaker of the Dalmatian language. 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. When he was killed by a landmine on June 10, 1898, the language became extinct. Dalmatian is an extinct Romance language formerly spoken along the Dalmatian coast of Croatia and as far south as Kotor in Montenegro. ... Krk (Italian Veglia) is a Croatian island in the northern Adriatic Sea, located near Rijeka in the Bay of Kvarner and part of the Primorje-Gorski Kotar county. ... Dalmatian is an extinct Romance language formerly spoken along the Dalmatian coast of Croatia and as far south as Kotor in Montenegro. ... First language (native language, mother tongue, or vernacular) is the language a person learns first. ... June 10 is the 161st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (162nd in leap years), with 204 days remaining. ... 1898 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ...
The last speaker of any Dalmatian dialect was TuoneUdaina (in Italian: Antonio Udina), and he was killed by a landmine on June 10, 1898.
His language was studied by an Italian scholar, Matteo Giulio Bartoli who visited him in 1897 and wrote down thousands of words, stories, accounts of his life, which were published in a book, with Italian translation, which provides much information on the vocabulary, phonology and grammar of the language.
The Dalmatian of the sole surviving (semi-)speaker, TuoneUdaina, was surveyed in the late 1870s and again towards the end of his life in the late 1890s.
These fairly extensive records curiously suggest that a systematic morphological change took place in those two decades such that by the 1890s the distinction between present and imperfect indicative had largely been neutralized (a development unique among Romance languages) in favour of the imperfect tense-forms.
I argue that the data are authentic and that the change, whether it occurred just in Udaina's head or was already underway in the last years of Dalmatian as a spoken language, is purely 'internal' and not motivated by contact with other languages.
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