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 should not be confused with Venetic, an apparently unrelated (and extinct) Indo-European language that was spoken in the Veneto region around the 6th century BC.
| 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 |
| Table of contents |
|
2 Geographic Distribution 3 Language features 4 Writing System 5 External links |
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 also retained the Latin concepts of gender (masculine and feminine) and number (singular and plural). Nouns and adjectives can be modified by suffixes that indicate several qualities such as size, endearment, deprecation, etc. Adjectives (usually postfixed) and articles are inflected to agree with the noun in gender and number:
Venetian does not have the "doubled consonant" sounds characteristic of Tuscan and many other Italian "dialects": thus Italian fette, palla, penna ("slices", "ball", and "pen") are fete, bala, and pena in Venetian. The masculine singular ending, which is usually -o in Italian, is often voided in Venetian, particularly in the countryside varieties: Italian pieno ("full") is pien, and altare is altar. Also, the masculine article el is often shortened to 'l.
The Venetian lexicon has a large number of original word forms, such as tosàt ("lad", in Italian ragazzo), técia ("pan", pentola), pirón ("fork", forchetta), caréga ("chair", sedia), còtoa ("skirt", sottana), bìsi ("peas", piselli), sgorlàr ("to shake", scuotere), and many more.
A peculiarity of Venetian grammar is the use of mandatory "redundant" pronouns in some sentences:
Venetian does not have an official writing system, but it is commonly written using the Latin alphabet — sometimes with the addition of a couple of letters and/or diacritics for the sounds that do not exist in Italian, such as "ç" for [θ]. Otherwise, the spelling rules are mostly those of Italian, except that "x" traditionally sounds similar to the "z" in English "zero".
Recently there have been attempts to standardize the script, but these have not been very successful because of regional variations in pronunciation and incompatibility with existing literature.
Classification
Geographic Distribution
Language features
Familial attributes
Like all Romance languages, Venetian has mostly abandoned the Latin case system, in favor of prepositions and a more rigid SVO sentence structure It has thus become more analytic, if not quite as much as English. Venetian also has the Romance articles, both definite (derived from the Latin demonstrative illo) and indefinite (derived from the numeral uno).Specific attributes
Venetian has only one sound not present in Italian, a labiodental fricative similar to Greek θ (theta); it occurs, for example, in θena ("supper"). However this sound, which is present only in some variants of the language, is considered "provincial" and is therefore being replaced by other sounds like [s], [z], [sh]. Some linguists also distinguish a "normal L" from a "soft L".
Another peculiarity is the use of the phrase drìo a, literally "behind to", to indicate continuing action:
Venetian: el can 'l jèra sporc (literally, "the dog he was dirty").
Venetian: me pàre 'l jèra drìo a parlàr (lit. "my father he was behind to speak").Writing System
External links