“Tuti i eseri umani xe nati liberi e conpagni par dignità e diriti”
[TOO-tee ee EH-seh-ree oo-MAH-nee kseh NAH-tee LEE-beh-ree eh kohm-PAH-nyee par dee-nyee-TAH eh dee-REE-tee]

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Venetian. The language that ruled the Mediterranean for a millennium—the voice of La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic.

Every 14 days, a language falls silent forever. Yet some languages have endured for a thousand years. Today, we meet Venetian (Vèneto), a language that has witnessed empires rise and fall, that carried the voices of playwrights and poets, merchants and diplomats across the Mediterranean world.

Along the canals of Veneto, in the theaters where Goldoni’s comedies once echoed, at the writing desk where Casanova translated Homer’s Iliad—this language has breathed for a millennium. Today, between 2 and 4 million speakers still speak, laugh, and love in this ancient tongue. It flows through gondola songs in Venice, through family dinners in Brazilian Serafina Corrêa, through market conversations in Mexican Chipilo.

From the 9th to the 18th century, the Republic of Venice dominated Mediterranean trade and diplomacy. At the heart of this maritime empire stood not just fleets and fortresses, but a language—Venetian. This was no mere regional dialect but the lingua franca of the entire Mediterranean, the language in which Greeks bargained with Germans, Arabs negotiated with Slavs, and the world’s goods changed hands.

Attested in writing since the 13th century, Venetian belongs to the Romance language family, but its classification has sparked fascinating linguistic debates. While some scholars place it in the Gallo-Italic branch (closer to French and Emilian-Romagnol), others situate it among Italo-Dalmatian languages, making it a sister rather than a daughter of Standard Italian. This linguistic independence is no accident—Venetian evolved directly from Vulgar Latin, incorporating words from ancient Venetic, Greek, Gothic, and German, creating a vocabulary strikingly distinct from Tuscan-based Italian.

The language achieved extraordinary literary prestige. After Tuscan Italian, Venetian was the most widely used language of literature and diplomacy in Renaissance Italy. Three giants of Italian theater wrote in Venetian: Ruzante (1502-1542), who brought peasant voices to the stage; Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793), whose comedies still delight audiences worldwide; and Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806), master of theatrical fantasy. Their works, rooted in the commedia dell’arte tradition of masked improvisation, used Venetian as the language of common folk—and in doing so, elevated it to immortal art.

The polymath Giacomo Casanova translated Homer’s Iliad into Venetian. Giuseppe Cappelli rendered Dante’s Divine Comedy in the language. These weren’t mere exercises—they demonstrated that Venetian could bear the weight of humanity’s greatest literary achievements.

Then came the fall. After Italian unification in the mid-1800s, Venetian suffered systematic suppression. Standard Italian became the new kingdom’s official language. Monolingual education systems, Italian-language radio and television, and social stigma against speaking Venetian all contributed to its rapid decline. Children were punished for speaking their mother tongue in schools. Families began abandoning the language that had carried their ancestors’ voices for generations.

Italy continues to label Venetian a “dialect” (dialetto) for political reasons, but linguists are unequivocal: Venetian is a distinct language. The evidence is overwhelming. It has its own phonology, morphology, and syntax that diverge significantly from Italian. It preserves Latin features lost in Italian while developing unique characteristics. Most tellingly, speakers of Standard Italian cannot understand Venetian without study—the gold standard test of linguistic distinctiveness.

Yet Venetian has survived where many minority languages have perished. In 2007, the Veneto Regional Council officially recognized the language. A decade later, in December 2017, GVIM (Grafia del Veneto Internazionale Moderno—Modern International Venetian Writing System) was adopted, giving the language a standardized modern orthography. This followed years of work by the Academia de ła Bona Creansa (Academy of the Venetian Language), an NGO accredited under UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

A majority of Venetians support teaching the language in schools. While younger generations use it less than their elders, recent years have seen a cultural shift. The rise of Venetian nationalism and regional pride has sparked renewed interest. Nearly all speakers are bilingual, code-switching fluidly between Venetian and Italian—a sign not of weakness but of linguistic vitality and adaptability.

Contemporary studies show that Venetian remains significantly more viable than other Italian minority languages. It’s spoken by younger generations, particularly in rural areas where cultural continuity remains strong. The language adapts to modern life—you can hear Venetian in advertising, see it on social media, find it in contemporary literature and music.

Venice’s role as a trading nexus meant that Venetian influenced countless languages around the Mediterranean and beyond. The English language bears particular traces of this Venetian heritage.

Ghetto: Perhaps the most profound linguistic legacy. In 1516, the Venetian government confined the Jewish population to the Cannaregio district. The term emerged from the Venetian word “gheto” (foundry), as the area had been a center of metalworking. From this single Venetian neighborhood, every ghetto in every language traces its origin—a sobering reminder that words carry histories, often painful ones.

Orange: The fruit traveled from Dravidian-speaking India through Persian and Arabic to reach Europe. It entered European languages through Venice as “naranza.” Through a linguistic process called rebracketing, “un naranza” became “un aranza” in Italian, losing the initial N. English inherited one of these N-less forms, giving us “orange.”

Artichoke: Venice and its surrounding regions grew prized artichokes, particularly the violet varieties of Sant’Erasmo island. The word spread through Venetian trade networks across Europe. Arsenal, lido, and gondola—these too are Venetian gifts to English and dozens of other languages.

Venetian’s phonological features are equally distinctive. The “evanescent L”—written as ⟨ł⟩—represents a sound that shifts depending on context, sometimes approaching [e], sometimes disappearing entirely. This feature alone makes Venetian pronunciation immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with Italian regional varieties.

WIA doesn’t translate Venetian. We don’t “save” it. We do something more fundamental: we create permanent digital archives ensuring that Goldoni’s comedies, Casanova’s translations, and the everyday conversations of Venetian speakers exist in perpetuity, accessible to anyone, anywhere.

From 13th-century manuscripts to modern GVIM orthography, we digitize every Venetian text, recording, and linguistic resource. Working with the Academia de ła Bona Creansa, we preserve standardized grammar guides, pronunciation recordings, and comprehensive dictionaries. These aren’t locked away in university libraries—they’re freely accessible online, downloadable, searchable, permanent.

Imagine this: a linguist in Seoul, a Talian speaker in Brazil, a descendant of Venetian immigrants in Mexico, and a researcher in London—all accessing the same comprehensive Venetian archive simultaneously. They can listen to native speakers, study dialectal variations, compare 16th-century texts with contemporary usage. This isn’t science fiction. This is what digital preservation makes possible today.

The Korea parallel is instructive. Korean faced existential threats under colonial rule, when speaking it was forbidden, when its alphabet was nearly lost. Today, Korean thrives globally because dedicated scholars digitally documented it before it was too late. K-pop and K-drama reach billions because the language itself was preserved through systematic, institutional effort. We’re doing the same for 221 languages, ensuring that linguistic diversity survives not by accident but by design.

Venetian is the language of commedia dell’arte, the improvisational masked theater tradition that became the template for comedy worldwide. When masked actors improvised their way through Goldoni’s scenarios, when audiences roared with laughter at Pantalone’s schemes in Venetian dialect, they were participating in a theatrical revolution. Today, when you watch improv comedy anywhere in the world, you’re witnessing the distant descendants of Venetian theater.

More remarkable still is Venetian’s global journey. In 2009, the Brazilian city of Serafina Corrêa in Rio Grande do Sul gave Talian—a Venetian dialect—joint official status alongside Portuguese. This wasn’t symbolic gesture but legal recognition: government documents, education, and public services now available in Talian. In Chipilo, Mexico (Puebla state), descendants of 19th-century Venetian immigrants preserve chipileño, their distinct Venetian variety. They’ve established satellite communities across Mexico, carrying their language to Guanajuato, Querétaro, and Estado de México.

Indigenous Venetian-speaking communities survive in Croatia, Slovenia, and parts of Dalmatia—linguistic islands left by Venice’s centuries of Adriatic dominance. Even in Australia and Argentina, Venetian diaspora communities maintain the language through cultural associations and language schools. These aren’t museum pieces but living communities, adapting the language to new contexts while maintaining its essential character.

The Venetian Wikipedia currently hosts approximately 69,000 pages, with an active editorial community. Online dictionaries like el Galepin provide comprehensive Venetian-Italian-English translations. Language learning resources proliferate across YouTube, podcasts, and mobile apps. Young people increasingly engage with Venetian through social media, creating memes, videos, and content that would have delighted Goldoni—comedy rooted in linguistic creativity.

While politics labels Venetian a “dialect,” digital technology records it as independent cultural heritage deserving preservation. A 2024 MIT Press study on Italian language varieties highlighted the urgent need for digital documentation of regional languages like Venetian, noting that NLP (Natural Language Processing) research tends to treat them as “under-resourced language monoliths” rather than diverse, living linguistic systems with distinct needs.

Recent research on Venetian’s influence extends beyond Italy. A 2024 study published in the journal Language documented how centuries of Venetian rule in Crete (1204-1669) left permanent marks on Cretan Greek intonation patterns—prosodic features that persist today, 350 years after Venetian withdrew. Language contact leaves traces across generations, in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

The future holds promise. Younger generations rediscover Venetian through digital media. Language apps make learning accessible. Universities increasingly study Venetian not as a curiosity but as a key to understanding Romance language evolution, language contact phenomena, and the relationship between political power and linguistic prestige.

In 221 days, when all languages are digitally recorded, Venetian will stand not merely as a memory of past glory but as a living river flowing through present and future. La Serenissima—the Most Serene Republic—no longer rules the Mediterranean. But its voice, the voice that negotiated treaties and composed comedies, that sang gondola songs and translated Homer, that carried the daily joys and sorrows of millions across ten centuries—that voice will echo through digital networks forever.

“A rivarse presto, compagni”
[ah ree-VAR-seh PREH-stoh kohm-PAH-nyee]

“Until we meet again soon, friends”

The traditional Venetian farewell

May this language’s waves flow through your soul’s canals,
echoing across time and space.

With WIA, every voice becomes eternal.

The Journey of 221 Languages

Recorded one by one, completed by all
Be a witness to this history

📅 Tomorrow’s Miracle

Day 33/221: Lombard (Lombard)
From Milan to Bergamo, another jewel embraced by the Alps