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Tuone Udaina |
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Tuone Udaina (died June 10, 1898; Antonio Udina in Italian) was the last speaker of the Dalmatian language.1 2 He was the main source of knowledge about his parents' dialect, that of the island of Veglia (modern Krk), for the linguist Matteo Bartoli, who recorded it in 1897. Vegliot Dalmatian was not Udaina's 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 a land mine on June 10, 1898, the language became extinct.