Venetian language


Venetian, also known as wider Venetian or Venetan, is a Romance language spoken natively in the northeast of Italy, mostly in Veneto, where most of the five million inhabitants can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto: in Trentino, Friuli, the Julian March, Istria, and some towns of Slovenia, Dalmatia and the Bay of Kotor by a surviving indigenous Venetian population, and in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the United States and the United Kingdom by Venetians in the diaspora.
Although referred to as an "Italian dialect" even by some of its speakers, the label is primarily political, referring to geography and not linguistics. In the realm of linguistics, Venetian is often considered a separate language from Italian, with its own local varieties. Its precise place within the Romance language family remains somewhat controversial however. Both Ethnologue and Glottolog group it into the Gallo-Italic branch. Devoto, Avolio and Ursini reject such classification, and places it in the Italo-Dalmatian branch of Romance.

History

Like all members of the Romance language family, Venetian evolved from Vulgar Latin, and is thus a sister language of Italian and other Romance languages. Venetian is first attested in writing in the 13th century.
The language enjoyed substantial prestige in the days of the Republic of Venice, when it attained the status of a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Sea. Notable Venetian-language authors include the playwrights Ruzante, Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi. Following the old Italian theatre tradition, they used Venetian in their comedies as the speech of the common folk. They are ranked among the foremost Italian theatrical authors of all time, and plays by Goldoni and Gozzi are still performed today all over the world.
Other notable works in Venetian are the translations of the Iliad by Giacomo Casanova and Francesco Boaretti, the translation of the Divine Comedy by Giuseppe Cappelli, and the poems of Biagio Marin. Notable too is a manuscript titled Dialogo de Cecco di Ronchitti da Bruzene in perpuosito de la stella Nuova attributed to Girolamo Spinelli, perhaps with some supervision by Galileo Galilei for scientific details.
Several VenetianItalian dictionaries are available in print and online, including those by Boerio, Contarini, Nazari and Piccio.
As a literary language, Venetian was overshadowed by Dante Alighieri's Tuscan dialect and languages of France like the Occitano-Romance languages and the langues d'oïl including the mixed Franco-Venetian.
Even before the demise of the Republic, Venetian gradually ceased to be used for administrative purposes in favor of the Tuscan-derived Italian language that had been proposed and used as a vehicle for a common Italian culture, strongly supported by eminent Venetian humanists and poets, from Pietro Bembo, a crucial figure in the development of the Italian language itself, to Ugo Foscolo.
Venetian spread to other continents as a result of mass migration from the Veneto region between 1870 and 1905, and between 1945 and 1960. Venetian migrants created large Venetian-speaking communities in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, where the language is still spoken today.
In the 19th century, large-scale immigration towards Trieste and Muggia extended the presence of the Venetian language eastward. Previously, the dialect of Trieste had been a Rhaeto-Romance dialect known as Tergestino. This dialect became extinct as a result of Venetian migration, which gave rise to the Triestino dialect of Venetian spoken there today.
Internal migrations during the 20th century also saw many Venetian-speakers settle in other regions of Italy, especially in the Pontine Marshes of southern Lazio where they populated new towns such as Latina, Aprilia and Pomezia, forming there the so-called "Venetian-Pontine" community.
Some firms have chosen to use Venetian language in advertising, as a beer did some years ago. In other cases advertisements in Veneto are given a "Venetian flavour" by adding a Venetian word to standard Italian: for instance an airline used the verb xe into an Italian sentence to advertise new flights from Marco Polo Airport.
In 2007, Venetian was given recognition by the Regional Council of Veneto with regional law no. 8 of 13 April 2007 "Protection, enhancement and promotion of the linguistic and cultural heritage of Veneto". Though the law does not explicitly grant Venetian any official status, it provides for Venetian as object of protection and enhancement, as an essential component of the cultural, social, historical and civil identity of Veneto.

Geographic distribution

Venetian is spoken mainly in the Italian regions of Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia and in both Slovenia and Croatia. Smaller communities are found in Lombardy, Trentino, Emilia-Romagna, Sardinia, Lazio, Tuscany and formerly in Romania.
It is spoken in North and South America by the descendants of Italian immigrants. Notable examples of this are Argentina and Brazil, particularly the city of São Paulo and the Talian dialect spoken in the Brazilian states of Espírito Santo, São Paulo, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina.
In Mexico, the Chipilo Venetian dialect is spoken in the state of Puebla and the town of Chipilo. The town was settled by immigrants from the Veneto region, and some of their descendants have preserved the language to this day. People from Chipilo have gone on to make satellite colonies in Mexico, especially in the states of Guanajuato, Querétaro, and State of Mexico. Venetian has survived in the state of Veracruz, where other Italian migrants have settled since the late 19th century. The people of Chipilo preserve their dialect and call it chipileño, and it has been preserved as a variant since the 19th century. The variant of Venetian spoken by the Cipiłàn is northern Trevisàn-Feltrìn-Belumàt.
In 2009, the Brazilian city of Serafina Corrêa, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, gave Talian a joint official status alongside Portuguese. Until the middle of the 20th century, Venetian was also spoken on the Greek Island of Corfu, which had long been under the rule of the Republic of Venice. Venetian had been adopted by a large proportion of the population of Cephalonia, one of the Ionian Islands, because the island was part of the Stato da Màr for almost three centuries.

Classification

Venetian is a Romance language and thus descends from Vulgar Latin. Its classification has always been controversial: According to Tagliavini, for example, it is one of the Italo-Dalmatian languages and most closely related to Istriot on the one hand and Tuscan–Italian on the other.
Some authors include it among the Gallo-Italic languages, and according to others, it is not related to either one. Although both Ethnologue and Glottolog group Venetian into the Gallo-Italic languages, the linguists Giacomo Devoto and Francesco Avolio and the Treccani encyclopedia reject the Gallo-Italic classification.
Although the language region is surrounded by Gallo-Italic languages, Venetian does not share some traits with these immediate neighbors. Some scholars stress Venetian's characteristic lack of Gallo-Italic traits or traits found further afield in Gallo-Romance languages or the Rhaeto-Romance languages. For example, Venetian did not undergo vowel rounding or nasalization, palatalize and, or develop rising diphthongs and, and it preserved final syllables, whereas, as in Italian, Venetian diphthongization occurs in historically open syllables.
On the other hand, Venetian does share many other traits with its surrounding Gallo-Italic languages, like interrogative clitics, mandatory unstressed subject pronouns, the "to be behind to" verbal construction to express the continuous aspect and the absence of the absolute past tense as well as of geminated consonants. Venetian has some unique traits which are shared by neither Gallo-Italic, nor Italo-Dalmatian languages, such as the use of the impersonal passive forms and the use of the auxiliary verb "to have" for the reflexive voice.
Modern Venetian is not a close relative of the extinct Venetic language spoken in Veneto before Roman expansion, although both are Indo-European, and Venetic may have been an Italic language, like Latin, the ancestor of Venetian and most other languages of Italy. The ancient Veneti gave their name to the city and region, which is why the modern language has a similar name, while their language may have also left a few traces in modern Venetian as a substrate.

Regional variants

The main regional varieties and subvarieties of Venetian language:
  • Central, with about 1,500,000 speakers
  • Venice
  • Eastern/Coastal
  • Western
  • Northern Sinistra Piave of the Province of Treviso
  • North-Central Destra Piave of the Province of Treviso
All these variants are mutually intelligible, with a minimum 92% in common among the most diverging ones. Modern speakers reportedly can still understand Venetian texts from the 14th century to some extent.
Other noteworthy variants are:
Like most Romance languages, Venetian has mostly abandoned the Latin case system, in favor of prepositions and a more rigid subject–verb–object sentence structure. It has thus become more analytic, if not quite as much as English. Venetian also has the Romance articles, both definite and indefinite.
Venetian also retained the Latin concepts of gender and number. Unlike the Gallo-Iberian languages, which form plurals by adding -s, Venetian forms plurals in a manner similar to standard Italian. Nouns and adjectives can be modified by suffixes that indicate several qualities such as size, endearment, deprecation, etc. Adjectives and articles are inflected to agree with the noun in gender and number, but it is important to mention that the suffix might be deleted because the article is the part that suggests the number. However, Italian is influencing Venetian language:
VenetianVeneto dialectsItalianEnglish
el gato grasoel gato grasoil gatto grassothe fat cat
la gata grasała gata grasala gatta grassathe fat cat
i gati grasii gati grasii gatti grassithe fat cats
le gate grasełe gate grasele gatte grassethe fat cats

In recent studies on Venetian variants in Veneto, there has been a tendency to write the so-called "evanescent L" as. While it may help novice speakers, Venetian was never written with this letter. In this article, this symbol is used only in Veneto dialects of Venetian language. It will suffice to know that in Venetian language the letter L in word-initial and intervocalic positions usually becomes a "palatal allomorph", and is barely pronounced.
Very few Venetic words seem to have survived in present Venetian, but there may be more traces left in the morphology, such as the morpheme -esto/''asto/isto'' for the past participle, which can be found in Venetic inscriptions from about 500 BC:
  • Venetian: Mi A go fazesto
  • Venetian Italian: Mi A go fato
  • Standard Italian: Io ho fatto