940 ronnie ferguson
in competition across the usage spectrum with a typologically close pres-
tige local spoken norm, in a characteristic late-19th-century situation of
political democratization, economic development, and centralized nation-
building. as a written medium, Venetian was confined, as before, to genre
literature, but even in the spoken domain it was now defined, and self-
defined, as a dialect.34 throughout the country, italian was encouraged
and spread through schooling, the mass media, and national service. it
was also diffused through internal and external migration, and subtly but
powerfully by the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic processes involved
in the desire for conformity and social betterment in a modern society.
the extension of a writing-versus-speech “bilingualism” to bilingualism in
speech itself inevitably involved the encroachment of italian into formal
then informal discourse even in Venice.
Venetian’s enduring prestige and increasing osmosis with italian have
shielded it from a survival linked solely to education and class. its func-
tional restriction has, therefore, been of a more complex order, with a
subtler differentiation of what constitutes “high” and “low” registers. in
spite of the partial retreat of venexian and increasing structural pressure
on it from italian, Venice displays in 2013 a highly idiosyncratic diglos-
sia in which Venetian and regional italian alternate or interpenetrate on
a flexible continuum. it remains, as in the past, the least stigmatized of
italian dialects, with exceptional speaker loyalty crossing all social classes
and age groups.35 Despite the dramatic drop in the population of the city
in recent decades, Venetian is a tenacious and characteristic presence in
a city overwhelmed by mass tourism and beset by housing difficulties. in
spite, too, of the inevitable presence and pressures of italian in all official
domains and in the media, venexian dominates everyday conversation
among Venetians, except the youngest. its presence is especially strong
in the more peripheral districts, Cannaregio, Castello, and the giudecca,
but also in le fod(e)re (literally “the folds” < germanic *fodr- “sheath”),
the more out-of the-way parts of the sestieri (< Lat. sextarii) of San Polo,
San Marco, Dorsoduro, and Santa Croce, less affected by the student and
tourist presence.
34 Revealing is the title of giuseppe Boerio’s great dictionary of Venetian, first pub-
lished in 1829: Dizionario del Dialetto Veneziano (Venice, 1829, 1865).
35 gabrielle gamberini, “Mise en mots de la structure diglossique: le cas de Venise,” in
thierry Bulot, ed., Langue urbaine et identité (Paris 1999), pp. 71–125.