venetian language 937
was a, rather than the, written language of the Venetian state. a consid-
erable number of documents—legal, diplomatic, and even legislative—
appeared, with increasing frequency over time, in Venetian. in the states
of central italy, especially Florence, the vernacular tended to emerge more
precociously and more clearly demarcated from Latin. in Venice, the con-
servatism of the Venetian chancery and the clerical monopoly of notarial
functions in the city until the 15th century meant that Latin persisted sub-
stantially until 1500 and even beyond. the writing-speech “bilingualism”
later to characterize Venetian’s relationship with italian was prefigured
in the Venetian state bureaucracy in the 14th and 15th centuries: Latin
tendentially for writing, Venetian for speech. although quantitatively very
much in the minority compared to Latin, by 1400 Venetian was appearing
in a wide range of written contexts: not only in private wills, contracts,
merchants’ correspondence, and mercantile handbooks, and in devo-
tional, moralizing, and escapist literature, but also in serious historical
works and even legislative documents. indeed, in its higher prose registers
it was achieving a stability and sophistication that gave every indication
of being the prelude to codification and even, given Venice’s exceptionally
enduring statehood, to standardization.
a number of obvious questions arise concerning the potential next
steps in the linguistic affirmation of Venetian. Was it codified and stan-
dardized? Was it ever Venice’s fully fledged language of state? Could Vene-
tian, the language of italy’s richest and most powerful polity, have actually
become the basis of italian itself? the negative answer to all three ques-
tions requires some explanation. a number of general cumulative factors
are worth bearing in mind. the first, as we noted, is that the vernacular
achieved autonomy from Latin relatively late in Venice. Second, there is
the lack of Venetian literary vitality in the late medieval period. this cre-
ative deficit does not have a single explanation. the pragmatic, commer-
cial bent of the city could and has been invoked. Venice’s very unusual
constitution and political and civic stability may have played a part, as
may the absence of centralized court patronage. in addition, it appears
that the vernacular, and literature in it, were viewed as essentially private
matters by the Signoria, and as irrelevant to public policy.24 Whatever
the reasons, Venice did not generate between 1300 and 1500 a literary cul-
ture to compare with that of the more turbulent Republican communes of
24 See Lorenzo tomasin, Il volgare e la legge. Storia linguistica del diritto veneziano
(secoli XIII–XVIII) (Padua, 2001), p. 108.