venetian language 947
intuitively suggest that demography is likely to have had an impact, and
perhaps a decisive one, on the configuration of the early Romance speech
of the Civitas Rivoalti that evolved into the Civitas Veneciarum and finally
into Venexia.
the third established fact is the provenance of the population streams
that came to the Venice lagoon in the Middle ages. Our knowledge of the
currents of migration from the mainland Roman region of Venetia et His-
tria is based substantially on the medieval Venetian chronicle tradition. in
spite of patriotic exaggeration and an over-emphasis on Venetian unique-
ness, the tradition is essentially borne out by other historical and archaeo-
logical evidence. What is incontrovertibly clear is that the population of
the lagoons came from the two areas of the future Veneto fronting the
lagoon of Venice: the north-east and the centre-south. these areas take
in the great ring of Venetic towns inherited by the Romans: atria, este,
Patavium, altinum, tarvisium, Opitergium, iulia Concordia, and aquileia.
a reading of the evidence suggests, prima facie, that the preponderant
input may have come from the north-east. it follows inevitably that the
late Latin/early Romance language varieties brought to the modestly or
scantily populated Venice lagoon were of the north-eastern and central-
southern Veneto types. Fortunately, these two varieties are both reason-
ably well attested in the written records from the 12th and 13th centuries
onwards, so that we have solid points of comparison with which to evalu-
ate the new lagoon Venetian when it is first attested in writing c.1200.
the fourth fact is linguistic. it is the striking structural variability, and
multiplicity of linguistic forms, found in the earliest Venetian texts, both
literary and non-literary.43 the variability is much more extreme than in
contemporaneous documents from other regions of italy, including those
from the Veneto mainland. equally striking is the rapid structural stability
that Venetian had achieved by the 15th century when it began its hege-
monic expansion on to the italian mainland. the records show radical
variability in Venetian being gradually eliminated in the trecento, so that
by 1400 its contours had become largely settled.
the fifth point that strikes the linguist is that, from c.1400 to the pres-
ent, some of the fundamental structures of Venetian are clearly classifi-
able as “intermediate.” they appear to lie linguistically between what one
would expect of a central-southern Veneto dialect, on the one hand, with
43 this is the case even in thematically and stylistically homogeneous legal texts such
as alfredo Stussi, ed., Testi veneziani del Duecento e dei primi del Trecento (Pisa, 1965).