venetian language 935
became progressively decoupled from the history of the communities
speaking them. the prevailing metaphor of the time was the biological
one, derived from Darwinism. it implicitly excluded speakers from the
processes of language-change, which were deemed to be unconscious and
largely unobservable in real time. Such tendencies were reinforced in the
20th century by the dominant paradigms of structural linguistics, initiated
by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), and generative linguistics, founded
by noam Chomsky (b. 1928). Both schools focused on the contempo-
rary (“synchronic”) states of language, neglecting their historical (“dia-
chronic”) dimension. they shunned the untidy reality of language change
over time and the role of speakers, as individuals and communities, in
effectuating language change. Historical linguistics itself compounded the
problem. under the influence of dominant ideologies of nationalism, it
tended throughout the 20th century to strongly emphasize standardized
languages, excluding from its conceptual parameters prestigious varieties
such as Venetian which had never undergone the codifying and standard-
izing processes that characterize modern national languages.
the rapprochement between language and history was maintained by
a few historical linguists such as Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927). He inves-
tigated the effect that languages in contact have on each other, incor-
porating historical and sociological data. in their different ways, dialect
geographers and linguistic atlas investigators also put language in social
and historical context. However, the notion of language as a historical
entity has only come to the fore with the rise of sociolinguistics. given an
initial impetus in the united States by the pioneering empirical studies of
William Labov (b. 1927) and by the theoretical and practical work on lan-
guages in contact by uriel Weinreich (1926–1967), sociolinguistic method-
ologies, embedding language in a social and cultural matrix, have come of
age in recent decades.22 they are being increasingly applied to the textual
study of past language strata in the work of historical sociolinguists. it is in
this context that Venetian has become an object of intense interest in lin-
guistics. the everyday language of Venice-city for a millennium, exerting a
profound impact for centuries on its territories on the italian mainland (la
terraferma) and overseas (de là da mar), Venetian has come to be seen as
the historically best-documented as well as the most culturally significant
22 On the history of 19th-century linguistics, see anna Morpurgo Davies, La linguis-
tica dell’Ottocento (Bologna, 1996). On the rise of sociolinguistics and on the contending
schools of linguistics in 20th-century america, see John Joseph, From Whitney to Chomsky.
Essays in the History of American Linguistics (edinburgh, 2002).