Venetian language

Venetian, also known as wider Venetian or Venetan (łengua vèneta) or vèneto), is a Romance language spoken natively in the northeast of Italy, mostly in Veneto, where most of the five million inhabitants can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto: in Trentino, Friuli, the Julian March, Istria, and some towns of Slovenia, Dalmatia (Croatia) and the Bay of Kotor (Montenegro) by a surviving indigenous Venetian population, and in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the United States and the United Kingdom by Venetians in the diaspora.

Although referred to as an "Italian dialect" (Venetian: diałeto; Italian: dialetto) even by some of its speakers, the label is primarily political, referring to geography and not linguistics. In the realm of linguistics, Venetian is often considered a separate language from Italian, with its own local varieties. Its precise place within the Romance language family remains somewhat controversial however. While Ethnologue groups it into the Gallo-Italic branch (and thus, closer to French and Emilian–Romagnol than to Italian), Glottolog places it in its Dalmatian Romance branch alongside Dalmatian and Istriot. Devoto, Avolio and Ursini reject such classification, and places it in the Italo-Dalmatian branch of Romance.