venetian language 945
- Origins to Affirmation:
Venetian Language and Demographics up to 1500
the origins of Venetian, like those of Venice, are not obvious. the research
challenge has been to understand conceptually, and find the tools to
determine practically, how the birth of a new variety of lagoon speech,
demarcated from the related speech varieties on the Veneto mainland,
came about in the medieval period. these important linguistic-cum-
historical issues, a crucial testing ground for the disciplinary synergy advo-
cated in the first section of the present essay, have only very recently been
tackled scientifically.40 this has involved examining and comparing the
earliest texts from Venice and from the Veneto terraferma against the
background of the centuries-long migration patterns towards the lagoon
in the medieval period. the aim has been to tease out the complex rela-
tionship between eV and the relevant mainland varieties that logically
preceded it, in order to establish degrees of affiliation. in so doing this
research has confronted the stubborn question of why the earliest Vene-
tian texts are so disconcertingly lacking in homogeneity and why the kind
of structural stability we might expect to find only materializes (and not
in all texts) in the later trecento and in the Quattrocento. approaching
the related questions of where Venice and Venetian come from, a nexus of
facts, some historical and demographic, some linguistic, stand out. these
interrelated and uncontroversial observations pointed in promising direc-
tions of research. the following are the main ones.
as is well known, Venice does not have a Roman past. it was, unusu-
ally for an italian city, a latecomer both as a political entity (the Ducatus
Venetus) and even more so as a substantial urban settlement. the lagoon
was probably only modestly settled in antiquity and in the early Middle
ages. Settlement began on a larger scale following the temporary, then
more permanent, migrations in the wake of the so-called barbarian inva-
sions, most importantly after the Longobard incursions of the late 6th
century. urbanization, though, came after the millennium.41 this times-
cale obviously implies that the emergence of Venetian as an autonomous
40 Ronnie Ferguson, “alle origini del veneziano: una koiné lagunare?” Zeitschrift für
romanische Philologie 121 (3) (2005), 476–509.
41 On the origins and settlement of Venice, see antonio Carile and giorgio Fedalto, Le
origini di Venezia (Bologna, 1978); giovanni Caniato, eugenio turri and Michele Zanetti,
La laguna di Venezia (Venice, 1995); Roberto Cessi, Origo civitatum Italiae seu Venetiarum
(Rome, 1933); and Cessi, Venezia Ducale (Venice, 1963). On the early Venetian chronicles,
see giovanni Monticolo, ed., Cronache veneziane antichissime (Rome, 1890).