ided that the official language of the Republic would be the Ragusan dialect of the Romance Dalmatian language, and forbade the use of the Slavic language in senatorial debate. The Gospari (the Aristocracy) held on to their language for many centuries, while it slowly disappeared.
Although the Latin language was in official use, inhabitants of the republic were mostly native speakers of Slavonic languages (as confirmed by P. A. Tolstoj in 1698, when he noted In Dalmatia... Dubrovnikans....called themselves as Ragusan (Raguseos) and always have pride in the Republic). The Dalmatian language was also spoken in the city. The Italian language as spoken in the republic was heavily influenced by the Venetian language and the Tuscan dialect. Italian took root among the Dalmatian Romance-speaking merchant upper classes, as a result of Venetian influence.
Austrian rule
When the Habsburg Empire annexed these provinces after the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the new authorities implemented a bureaucratic administration, established the Kingdom of Dalmatia, which had its own Sabor (Diet) or Parliament, based in the city of Zadar, and political parties such as the Autonomist Party and the People's Party. They introduced a series of modifications intended to slowly centralize the bureaucratic, tax, religious, educational, and trade structure. Unfortunately for the local residents, these steps largely failed, despite the intention of wanting to stimulate the economy. And once the personal, political and economic damage of the Napoleonic Wars had been overcome, new movements began to form in the region, calling for a political reorganization of the Adriatic along the national lines.
The combination of these two forces�a flawed Habsburg administrative system and new national movement claiming ethnicity as the founding block toward a community�posed a particularly perplexing problem; since Dalmatia was a province ruled by the German-speaking Habsburg
