Tuone Udaina

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Pegship (talk | contribs) at 01:05, 7 November 2007 (just guessing). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Tuone Udaina (died June 10, 1898; Antonio Udina in Italian) was the last speaker of the Dalmatian language. He was the main source of knowledge for his parents' dialect, that of the island of Veglia (modern Krk), to the linguist Matteo Bartoli who recorded it in 1897, though Udaina 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. He worked as a barber, and he was called Burbur ('barber' in Dalmatian) because of it.

When he was killed by an anarchist bomb on June 10, 1898, the language became extinct.