Dalmatian

The Dalmatians are the Romance-speaking heirs of the romanized Illyrian coast, their walled towns surviving the seventh-century Slavic settlement while the hinterland passed to Croatian tribes. From Zadar to Dubrovnik, these city-states kept Latin law, Catholic worship and the vulgar Latin that became Dalmatian, split into Ragusan of Dubrovnik and Vegliote of Krk.

The cities traded with Italy and Byzantium and passed between Byzantine, Croatian and Hungarian overlords as Venice built an Adriatic empire: Zadar and northern towns accepting Venetian rule, Venetian increasingly displacing Dalmatian in business and administration.

Dubrovnik, called Ragusa, became an independent republic, where Ragusan remained the language of law until the late fifteenth century and the Senate in 1472 protected it against Slavic. In 1337 the Dalmatian towns formed a bilingual coastal civilization, Romance in identity and faith yet interwoven with the Slavic hinterland through commerce and intermarriage.