Istrian Albanian

Istrian Albanian is an extinct dialect of the Albanian language, which was spoken in the area of Poreč, Croatia, until the late 19th century.^[1]

History

From the 13th to the 17th century due to the depopulation of the Istrian Peninsula, the Republic of Venice repopulated the region with settlers, which among others included Albanians.^[2] The coalescence of the various dialects spoken by the settlers led to the formation of the Istrian Albanian dialect. The only surviving text of the dialect was written by the local scholar Pietro Stankovich in the 1830s. Stankovich recorded a version of the Parable of the Prodigal Son and a vocabulary list of the dialect.^[3]

References

1. "Albanian language - Dialects". Britannica.com Inc. Retrieved 2 March 2012.
2. Fine, John Van Antwerp (2006-03-02). When ethnicity did not matter in the Balkans: a study of identity in pre-nationalist Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia in the medieval and early-modern periods. University of Michigan Press. p. 118. ISBN 978-0-472-11414-6. Retrieved 2 March 2012.
3. Altimari, Francesco (2011). "Analisi di alcuni manoscritti con testi e lessemi sull’ albanese dell’ Istria" (PDF). Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Retrieved 2 March 2012.