Karst Plateau
The vast majority of the inhabitants of the Karst Plateau are ethnic Slovenes. Traditionally, only the village of San Martino del Carso (in the municipality of Sagrado), has been inhabited by Friulian speakers, while all the rest of the region was almost entirely Slovene-speaking from the Middle Ages till the late 1940s and 1950s, when Istrian Italians fleeing from Yugoslavia were settled in Karst villages in the Province of Trieste, especially in the municipality of Duino. As a consequence, today an estimated one fifth of the population of the Karst Plateau is Italian speaking, while the rest is mostly Slovene speaking.