Istria is a historically multiethnic, multinational, multicultural and multilingual region deeply marked by geopolitic specificities, sociohistorical peculiarities and the centennial cohabitation of the Slavic and Romance (and Germanic) ethnic/sociocultural components. The paper aims to describe the main features of the complex and fragmented Istrian multilingual environment characterized by cross-cultural syncretism, with special emphasis on the linguistic repertoire of the Istrian italophone speaking community and the unique linguistic macrosystem, which is shaped by asymmetric and imperfectly polyglossic relations among three national standard languages, macro-regional dialects, micro-regional dialects and local dialects.