Bartoli, Matteo Giulio

Matteo Giulio Bartoli, (born Nov. 22, 1873, Albona d’Istria, Austria-Hungary [now Labin, Croatia]—died Jan. 23, 1946, Turin, Italy), linguist who emphasized the geographic spread of linguistic changes and their interpretation in terms of history and culture.

Having obtained his doctorate at the University of Vienna, Bartoli in 1907 became professor at the University of Turin, where he remained until his retirement. In an important early study, Das Dalmatische (1906; “Dalmatian”), he documented and analyzed the now-extinct Romance dialect of the Adriatic island of Veglia (Krk, Yugos.). He later advanced his theories about language in Introduzione alla neolinguistica (1925; “Introduction to Neolinguistics”) and Saggi di linguistica spaziale (1945; “Essays on Areal Linguistics”). In his view, there is a direct, causal connection between linguistic expansion and distribution, on the one hand, and linguistic change and its order of occurrence, on the other. Though his chief interest was in Romance languages, he also addressed himself to Proto-Indo-European languages.