Matteo Bartoli

Matteo Giulio Bartoli (22 November 1873, Labin/Albona – 23 January 1946, Turin/Torino) was an Italian linguist from Istria (then a part of Austria-Hungary, today part of modern Croatia).

He obtained a doctorate at the University of Vienna and was heavily influenced by his teacher Wilhelm Meyer-Lubke, as well as by certain theories of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce and the German linguist Karl Vossler. He later also studied with Jules L. Gillieron in Paris.

In 1907 he became professor extraordinaire of comparative history of classical and neo-Latin languages in Pisa, but soon after that he move to the University of Turin where he taught the same subjects in the Faculty of Letters until his death.

His study on the Dalmatian language, Das Dalmatische (2 vol. 1906) is the only known complete description of the language which is now extinct. He wrote it in Italian in two volumes, and later published a translation to German. However, the original Italian is now lost and only in 2000 an Italian translation from German was published. Bartoli used data gathered in 1897 from the last speaker of Dalmatian, Tuone Udaina, who was killed by a bomb on June 10, 1898; and thus the language became extinct.

He also wrote Introduzione alla neolinguistica ("Introduction in neolinguistics", 1925) and Saggi di linguistica spaziale ("Essays of spatial linguistics", 1945) and was the teacher of Antonio Gramsci.