With the development of Croatian nationalism, critics such as Croatian historian Duško Večerina, asserted that these evaluations were not conducted by modern scientific standards and that they took spoken language as the criterion, rather than blood, origin and ethnicity.
Not only Italian irredentists (like Gabriele D'Annunzio) but also Italian prominent scholars (like Angelo Vivante) alleged that Joseph Fölch did not include the Dalmatian islands of Cres (Cherso), Lošinj (Lussino), Krk (Veglia), Vis (Lissa), Hvar (Lesina), Korcula (Curzola) and many others islands with significant Italian communities.