A linguistic history of Venice

The present study is the first monograph that attempts to trace the linguistic history of Venice from the origins of the city to the present. That an overall assessment of Venetian should have had to wait so long is, at first glance, surprising. Venice is one of Europe’s great cities with a complex and seductive culture ranking among the continent’s most important. Historically, Venetian stands out as arguably the most significant of all Italy’s ‘dialects’, with a textual tradition going back 800 years. It remains the most vital and prestigious among Italy’s rapidly disappearing spoken vernaculars. In addition, the linguistic and philological scholarship devoted to Venice and the Veneto, both past and present, is one of the richest in the ‘Italo-Romance’ area, in terms of quality and quantity. Outstanding individual scholars have shed light on structural, lexical, textual and contextual aspects of Venetian itself. These include some of the foremost linguists of their generation, such as Manlio Cortelazzo, Giulio Lepschy, Zarko Mui-» jacic, Giovan Battista Pellegrini, Alfredo Stussi, Edward Tuttle, Alberto Zamboni and Paolo Zolli.