934 ronnie ferguson
On the linguistic side there are two main reasons contributing to the
relative neglect of Venetian by historians. the first is specific to the nature
of Venetian as a historical entity. the second is more broadly attribut-
able to the traditionally problematic relationship between linguistics and
history.
Venice’s disinclination to legally define its own vernacular and its
consequent disinterest, until the 19th century, in codifying its contours
in grammar books and dictionaries is undoubtedly part of the practical
problem. this has been compounded by the fall from official grace of
Venetian since 1797 and especially since italian unification in 1866. no
longer the spoken and partly written language of a city state, definitely
not the official language of a modern nation state, Venetian now possesses
none of the socio-political trappings of a “language,” including standard-
ization, a stable spelling system, legal protection, and educational prom-
ulgation. Relegated to the status of a “dialect,”21 Contemporary Venetian
is constantly exposed to, and in everyday interaction with, italian, its sur-
vival now largely down to the loyalty of the remaining 60,000 or so native
speakers in the city.
the formation and development of linguistics as a discipline in the 19th
and 20th centuries also helps to explain the conspicuous absence of the
language dimension in Venetian historical studies. nineteenth-century
linguistics was historical in the sense that its central mission was to estab-
lish, using the comparative method, the relationships between languages
over time in terms of their “genetic” and, later, typological connections. it
was within this framework that the fundamental indo-european language
“family” model crystallized. the structures of, and relationships between,
the major sub-groupings of indo-european, notably Romance, germanic,
and Slavic, were teased out and documented in detail. However, the anxi-
ety of historical linguists to establish their discipline as an autonomous
science, in parallel to the natural sciences, led them to conceive of each
language system as a self-sufficient organism evolving under pressures
that were considered strictly internal. in this way the history of languages
Venice is a partial exception in that it is problematic to straightforwardly describe Vene-
tian as having lower prestige.
21 in the pejorative sense of a substandard form of a national language, the term dialect
has no place in scientific linguistics. Venetian, like the other so-called “dialects” of italian,
is in fact a dialect of Latin, descended from it through processes of language change. it can
also be described geo-historically as a dialect of italy. in its loaded sense, “dialect” reflects
a socio-political value judgment linked to the formation of national languages and to the
consequent downgrading of other varieties spoken on a national territory.