Italians are pretty similiar to us, Croats, in a lot of ways. I recognize a lot of these things haha.
One thing that many Italians don't realize is that Italy is just a short trip across the Adriatic Sea to Albania and the mix of other ethnic based slav countries. I had a student from the east side of the Adriatic who worked in an Italian restaurant and spoke broken Italian. I called him Quasi-Paisan.
A lot of Croatians who live in Istria region of Croatia(and the better part of Dalmatia) speak fluent or broken Italian. Real Istrians speak fluently, but those who live in Dalmatia speak broken Italian. It's because Istria is(still today) in some part owned by Italy, as well as Slovenia and Croatia, although majority of the territory belongs to Croatia. However, Italians had a stronghold in Istria for quite some time and the language was, as it goes, passed on generation to generation. In Dalmatia, the tourist center of Croatia, they have to speak at least a little bit of Italian because of the tourists.
Originally Posted By: Moe_Tilden
Originally Posted By: CleanBandit
Italians are pretty similiar to us, Croats, in a lot of ways. I recognize a lot of these things haha.
Of course. Slovenes too are very similar to native Italians.
Yeah, there's an entire section filled with Italians in a smaller part of Slovenia, but Slovenia was also under Italy's rule at one point in history, just like Istrian/Dalmatian part of Croatia.
