 The Italian speakers constituted (according to the Italian linguist Bartoli) nearly one third of Dalmatians in the second half of the 18th century.According to the Austrian census it had decreased to 12.5% in 1865 and 3.1% in 1890.There remains, however, a strong cultural, and, in part, ancestral heritage among the natives of the cities and islands, who today almost exclusively identify as Croats, but retain a sense of regional identity.