Back vowel mergers in Dalmatian Latin and Dalmatian Romance

Regarding the description of the vowel system of the Dalmatian Romance language, which is only partially known and died out by the end of the nineteenth century, different positions can be read in the literature about how Dalmatian behaved in terms of back vowel mergers in closed syllables and whether the Dalmatian language can therefore be dialectologically classified into the eastern asymmetric type or the western symmetrical type? The present study examines the Dalmatian situation (by reanalyzing the small number of relevant Dalmatian words) and the Latin situation (by exploring the merger of closed syllabic ō and ŭ in inscriptions with the help of the LLDB database) and takes the position that both Dalmatian Latin and Dalmatian Romance clearly belonged to the western symmetrical type in terms of closed syllabic back vowel mergers.