Romanian is the official and main language of Romania and Moldova. Romanian is part of the Eastern Romance sub-branch of Romance languages, a linguistic group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin which separated from the Western Romance languages in the course of the period from the 5th to the 8th centuries. To distinguish it within the Eastern Romance languages, in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. It is also spoken as a minority language by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania, and by the large Romanian diaspora. In total, it is spoken by 25 million people as a first language.
Dalmatia is one of the four historical regions of Croatia, alongside Central Croatia, Slavonia, and Istria, located on the east shore of the Adriatic Sea in Croatia.
Dubrovnik, historically known as Ragusa, is a city in southern Dalmatia, Croatia, by the Adriatic Sea. It is one of the most prominent tourist destinations in the Mediterranean, a seaport and the centre of the Dubrovnik-Neretva County. Its total population is 41,562. In 1979, the city of Dubrovnik was added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in recognition of its outstanding medieval architecture and fortified old town.
The Istriot language is a Romance language of the Italo-Dalmatian branch spoken by about 400 people in the southwestern part of the Istrian peninsula in Croatia, particularly in Rovinj and Vodnjan. It should not be confused with the Istrian dialect of the Venetian language or the more distantly related Istro-Romanian, a variety of Eastern Romance.
The proposed substratal elements in Romanian are mostly lexical items. The process of determining if a word is from the substratum involves comparison to Latin, languages with which Romanian came into contact, or determining if it is an internal construct. If there are no matching results, a comparison to Albanian vocabulary, Thracian remnants or Proto-Indo-European reconstructed words is made.
Tuone Udaina was the last known speaker of Dalmatian, a Romance language that evolved from Latin along the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. He was the main source of knowledge about his parents' dialect, that of the island of Krk, for the linguist Matteo Bartoli, who recorded it in 1897.
Common Romanian, also known as Ancient Romanian, or Proto-Romanian, is a comparatively reconstructed Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin and spoken by the ancestors of today's Romanians, Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, Istro-Romanians and related Balkan Latin peoples (Vlachs) between the 6th or 7th century AD and the 10th or 11th centuries AD. The evidence for this can be found in the fact that Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian share with each other their main language innovations comparative to Vulgar Latin on one hand, and distinctive from the other Romance languages on the other, according to Romanian linguist Marius Sala.
Morlachs is an exonym used for a rural Christian community in Herzegovina, Lika and the Dalmatian Hinterland. The term was initially used for a bilingual Vlach pastoralist community in the mountains of Croatia from the second half of the 14th until the early 16th century. Then, when the community straddled the Venetian–Ottoman border until the 17th century, it referred only to the Slavic-speaking people of the Dalmatian Hinterland, Orthodox and Catholic, on both the Venetian and Turkish side. The exonym ceased to be used in an ethnic sense by the end of the 18th century, and came to be viewed as derogatory, but has been renewed as a social or cultural anthropological subject. As the nation-building of the 19th century proceeded, the Vlach/Morlach population residing with the Croats and Serbs of the Dalmatian Hinterland espoused either a Croat or Serb ethnic identity, but preserved some common sociocultural outlines.
The History of Dalmatia concerns the history of the area that covers eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea and its inland regions, from the 2nd century BC up to the present day. The region was populated by Illyrian tribes around 1,000 B.C, including the Delmatae, who formed a kingdom and for whom the province is named. Later it was conquered by Rome, thus becoming the province of Dalmatia, part of the Roman Empire. Dalmatia was ravaged by barbaric tribes in the beginning of the 4th century.
Francesco Maria Appendini was an Italian Latin and Italian scholar who studied Slavic languages in the Republic of Ragusa. The French invasion prevented him from returning to Italy, and he adopted Republic of Ragusa as his own country. He took it upon himself to investigate its history and antiquities.
The Republic of Ragusa was an Croatian aristocratic maritime republic centered on the city of Dubrovnik in South Dalmatia that carried that name from 1358 until 1808. It reached its commercial peak in the 15th and the 16th centuries, before being conquered by Napoleon's French Empire and formally annexed by the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy in 1808. It had a population of about 30,000 people, of whom 5,000 lived within the city walls. Its motto was "Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro", a Latin phrase which can be translated as "Liberty is not well sold for all the gold".
Dalmatian Italians are the historical Italian national minority living in the region of Dalmatia, now part of Croatia and Montenegro.
Libertas is a 2006 Croatian-Italian co-production film directed by Veljko Bulajić. It is a biographical film about the 16th-century playwright Marin Držić and his conflict with authorities of the Republic of Ragusa.
Istrian Italians are an ethnic group from the Adriatic region of Istria in modern northwestern Croatia and southwestern Slovenia. Istrian Italians descend from the original Latinized population of Roman Histria, from the Venetian-speaking settlers who colonized the region during the time of the Republic of Venice, and from the local Croatian people who culturally assimilated.
The Dubrovnik subdialect is a subdialect of the Shtokavian dialect of Serbo-Croatian. It is spoken in the area of Dubrovnik and the littoral of the former Republic of Ragusa, from Janjina on the Pelješac peninsula to the Croatian border with Montenegro, island of Mljet.
The Fiuman dialect is the dialect of the Venetian language spoken in the Croatian city of Rijeka (Fiume). It is strongly influenced by Croatian Chakavian, Hungarian, German substrates, mainly due to the closeness between two different cultures and Austro-Hungarian rule.
Italians of Croatia are an autochthonous historical national minority recognized by the Constitution of Croatia. As such, they elect a special representative to the Croatian Parliament. There is the Italian Union of Croatia and Slovenia, which is a Croatian-Slovenian joint organization with its main site in Rijeka, Croatia and its secondary site in Koper, Slovenia.
Italian irredentism in Dalmatia was the political movement supporting the unification to Italy, during the 19th and 20th centuries, of Adriatic Dalmatia.
Dalmatian city-states were formerly Roman municipalities in Dalmatia where the local Romance population survived the Barbarian invasions after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 400s CE. Eight little cities were created by the indigenous Illyro-Roman inhabitants of the region, who maintained political links with the Eastern Roman Empire, which in return defended these cities, enabling their commercial trade with Byzantium.
