Venetian dialect
| Venetian | |
|---|---|
| Vèneto | |
| Native to | Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Brazil. |
| Region | |
|
Native speakers
|
3.9 million (2002) |
|
Indo-European
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | vene1258 |
| Linguasphere | 51-AAA-n |
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|
Venetian or Venetan (Venetian: vèneto, vènet or łéngua vèneta) is a Romance language spoken as a native language by almost four million people in the northeast of Italy, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where most of the five million inhabitants can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, Venezia Giulia, Istria, and some towns of Dalmatia, Slovenia, Croatia and Brazil.
Although referred to as an Italian dialect (Venetian diałeto, Italian dialetto) even by its speakers, Venetian is a separate language. Its precise place within the Romance language family is controversial; see below.
Like all Italian dialects in the Romance language family, Venetian is descended from Vulgar Latin and influenced by the Italian language. Venetian is attested as a written language in the 13th century. There are also influences and parallelisms with Greek and Albanian in words such as pirón (fork), inpiràr (to fork), caréga (chair) and fanèla (T-shirt).
The language enjoyed substantial prestige in the days of the Venetian Republic, when it attained the status of a lingua franca in the Mediterranean. Notable Venetian-language authors include the playwrights Ruzante (1502–1542), Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793) and Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806). Following the old Italian theatre tradition (Commedia dell'Arte), 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.
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