Into the past Diachronica 21:1 (2004), 85–111. issn 0176–4225 / e-issn 1569–9714© John Benjamins Publishing Company Morphological change in the dying years of Dalmatian * Martin Maiden Trinity College, Oxford This study is concerned with Vegliote, the last remnant of the Dalmatian branch of the Romance languages, as used by its very last speaker in the last quarter of the 19th century. Specifically, I shall deal with a peculiar morpho- logical neutralization of the distinction between present and past imperfect tenses, which becomes increasingly common in that speaker’s usage over the last twenty years of his life. After careful consideration of the status and significance of data gleaned from analysis of the idiolect of just this one speaker, I shall explain the analogical mechanisms of the change and argue that they constitute strong evidence for the diachronic importance of Aro- noff’s notion of the ‘morphome’ — a recurrent distributional regularity, wholly lacking in extramorphological motivation, within the inflectional paradigm. I shall also consider the significance of these facts for our under- standing of the morphological processes at work in language death. Keywords: Morphomic structure, morphological change, language death, verbal paradigms, analogy, Romance languages, Dalmatian language 1. Introduction This study is concerned with a morphological peculiarity of Vegliote, the last remnant of the Dalmatian branch of the Romance languages. More precisely, it deals with a characteristic of Vegliote as used by its last surviving speaker, *I wish to thank three anonymous Diachronica referees for their very constructive comments on the first draft of this study.