948 ronnie ferguson
its more “italian”-type structures, and a north-eastern Veneto dialect, on
the other, with its gallo-italian features. Venetian after c.1400 seemed
positioned between these two poles.44
Lastly there is documented evidence from the trecento onwards—
that is, from the time of the settling of the eV norm—of the survival of
some “nonstandard” structural forms in Venetian. these tend to appear in
writings of less exalted register, such as personal letters and merchants’
correspondence. Later they show up in 16th-century Venetian dialect the-
ater in the mouths of low-life characters. they are still evident in 18th-
century theatrical texts by goldoni and others. More significantly still,
there is early evidence of the survival of actual nonstandard sub-varieties
of Venetian in specific locations of the city itself. Marin Sanudo in 1500
tells us, for example, of the existence of what he calls a “nicoloto” form
of Venetian found in the western edge of the city in the fishing (and later
working-class) areas of Santa Marta and San nicolò dei Mendicoli.45 Such
remnants were still clear in giovanni Papanti’s 19th-century linguistic sur-
vey of Venice,46 and even nowadays elderly Venetians can recall areal dif-
ferences surviving in the recent past. What is particularly interesting from
our point of view is the location of these sub-varieties. Both early and late
evidence locates their focal points on the north-eastern and south-western
fringes of Venice in Santa Marta/San nicolò dei Mendicoli/San Basegio
and the anzolo Rafael on the one hand (as Sanudo pointed out), and in
Castello (San Martin and San Biagio) on the other. Can these differences
be simply attributed to spontaneous developments in marginal, isolated
poorer areas? Or were they, rather, tantalizing leftovers of the original
demographic dynamics of the city from north-east and south-west?
Before my own investigations, the two comprehensive hypotheses pro-
posed to take account of the above facts were the following: 1) Venetian is
essentially descended directly from the north-eastern Veneto type, espe-
cially that from the eastern treviso area, but with its most extreme fea-
tures removed in the late medieval period by conscious influence from the
44 On the intermediacy of Venetian between the two mainland Veneto types see
Ronnie Ferguson, “the Formation of the Dialect of Venice,” in anthony Lodge, ed., Aspects
of Linguistic Change, special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies 39.4 (2003), 454–
55; and Hans goebl, ‘La dialettometrizzazione integrale dell’aiS. Presentazione dei primi
risultati,” Revue de Linguistique Romane 72 (2008), 58–61.
45 angela Caracciolo aricò, ed., Marin Sanudo il Giovane: De origine, situ et magistrati-
bus urbis Venetae (Milan, 1980), p. 29.
46 giovanni Papanti, I parlari italiani in Certaldo (Livorno, 1875), p. 553.