Venetian language
Venetian is a Romance language spoken by over two million people in and around Venice. Although it is commonly called (even by its speakers) an Italian dialect, it is not derived from the Italian language. It is genetically more closely related to French and Spanish, and has more intelligibility with Spanish than Italian does. The language is called (dialeto) Veneto or Venessian in Venetian.
| Venetian (Veneto) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Italy, Croatia, Slovenia |
| Region: | The Adriatic |
| Total speakers: | 2,210,000 |
| Ranking: | valign="top" |
| Genetic classification: | Indo-European Italic Romance Italo-Western Western Gallo-Iberian Gallo-Romance Gallo-Italian Venetian |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | valign="top" |
| Regulated by: | valign="top" |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | roa |
| SIL | VEC |
Venetian, like all other Romance languages (including Italian and the so-called "Italian dialects"), descends from Latin. However, Venetian and Italian branch off from each other after Italo-Western; whereas Venetian and Spanish branch off after Gallo-Iberian; and Venetian and French don't branch off until after Gallo-Romance. So, genetically Venetian is more closely related to French and Spanish than it is to Italian.
Although there is not much mutual intelligibility with spoken French (because of the extreme changes in the pronunciation of French over time), there is some mutual intelligibility between Spanish and Venetian, certainly more than there is between Spanish and Italian.
Venetian is spoken in the Italian regions of Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia and in both Slovenian and Croatian Istria.
The language enjoyed substantial prestige in the days of the Venetian Republic (up to the 18th century). The plays of Carlo Goldoni are still performed today, and his characters — including Harlequin, Columbine, and Pierrot — have become part of the world's folklore. However, as a literary language Venetian was shadowed by the Tuscan "dialect" of Dante, which became the national language after the unification of Italy. Due to its non-official status, Venetian has been steadily losing ground to Italian. At present, virtually all of its speakers are bilingual, and use Venetian mostly in informal contexts.
Venetian has many of the traits common to Romance languages. It has mostly lost the Latin case system and has become more analytic, if not quite as much as English. Its nouns have two genders: masculine and feminine. And it has both definite and indefinite articles.
Venetian does not have an official writing system, but it is commonly written using the Latin alphabet, sometimes with the addition of a few letters and/or diacritics (such as "ÃÂç") for sounds that do not exist in Italian. The spelling rules are mostly those of Italian, except that "x" traditionally sounds similar to the "z" in English "zero".
Classification
Geographic Distribution
Grammar
Writing System
External links