942 ronnie ferguson
italian patriotism in the middle classes, and the removal of even spoken
venexian from the official public sphere.37
Typological Classification
in historical and linguistic terms, Venetian belongs to the Romance sub-
grouping of the indo-european language family. as such, it is a sister lan-
guage of the Romance varieties that are currently officially recognized
national languages of state: Portuguese, Spanish, French, italian, and
Rumanian. Venetian is equally a sister language in typological terms of
Romance varieties that have official recognition of various kinds, falling
short of exclusive state prerogatives—notably Catalan in Spain, Romantsch
in Switzerland and Dolomitic Ladin in italy—as well as of the Romance
dialects of italy and elsewhere that have no official status or protection.
Once a quasi language of state, Venetian at present is an unstandardized
and unofficial spoken Romance variety. in writing it is currently confined
to genres such as local poetry and theater and to humorous, satirical, or
alternative creative media such as cartoons. it also has visibility in Vene-
tian street signs and the names of local outlets, as well as in the Veneto
book market for traditional stories and sayings.
Structurally, Venetian is relatively close to modern standard italian:
relative, that is, to the exceptional dialectal diversity within italy, where
“dialects” can diverge further from each other than do national languages
and where Milanese, for example, is further structurally from italian than
italian is from Spanish. On key measures, Venetian is broadly intermediate
between italian and the gallo-italian dialects of northern italy (Piedmo-
nese, Ligurian, Lombard, emilian-Romagnol). Vocalically, Venetian (from
eV to CV) is characterized by a seven vowel system: /a/, /e/, /ε/, /i/, /o/,
/Ɔ/, /u/, reduced to /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ when the vowels are unstressed.
italian shares this system, although the distribution of the stressed mid
vowels /e/ ~ /ε/ and /o/ ~ /Ɔ/ is not always identical with that of Venetian.
Like italian, Venetian has never had either of the front rounded vowels /ø/
and /У/ that characterize gallo-italian dialect systems and French, as in
French feu and lune. nor does it have the weak central schwa vowel /ə/. as
in italian, there is a strong tendency in Venetian not to drop (“apocopate”)
37 On the Venetian political, cultural and linguistic context in the 19th century see Man-
lio Cortelazzo, “i dialetti e la dialettologia nell’Ottocento,” in girolamo arnaldi and Manlio
Pastore Stocchi, eds., Storia della cultura veneta, 6 vols (Vicenza, 1976–86), vol. 6 (1986):
Dall’età napoleonica alla prima guerra mondiale, pp. 343–63.