Venetian Alphabet & Letters

Venetian (vèneto) is the Romance language of Venice and the Veneto region of north-eastern Italy, once the everyday and trading language of the Republic of Venice. It is written in the Latin alphabet with spelling habits close to Italian (c and g are hard before a, o, u and soft before e and i, ch and gh keep them hard, as in ghe), but with a few letters of its own that make a Venetian text recognisable at a glance.

The CLDR alphabet for Venetian has the letters a b c d e f g h i j l m n o p r s t u v x z plus the accented vowels à é è ì ó ò ù. K, q, w and y are listed by CLDR as auxiliary letters; K and Q also occur in native Venetian words in some orthographies. J is a real letter here, the y sound of English yes: jenaro (January), majo (May), lujo (July). On top of that, many writers use ł, the Venetian l, which this page adds to the set (see below).

Venetian words often end in a consonant where Italian has a vowel: pan (bread), can (dog), bon (good), Nadal (Christmas). Spelling is not fully fixed: the main reference is the Grafia Veneta Unitaria, a common spelling published by the Veneto region in 1995, but older and informal texts, newspapers and songs each have their own habits, so you will meet the same word written in more than one way.

Venetian letters and their sounds: x, ł, z and s-c

X x is the most Venetian letter of all, and it is not the ks of English. It writes a buzzing voiced s, the sound of English zoo: xe (is, are), Venexia (Venice), caxa (house). The habit goes back to medieval Venetian writing, and Ligurian shares it. Some modern spellings write the same sound with z instead, as in dezenbre (December) and ingleze (English) in CLDR’s Venetian data, and depending on the town z can also sound like ds or like the th of English this.

Ł ł, the l with a stroke, marks the “evanescent l” of Venice and much of central Veneto: between vowels and at the start of a word before a vowel, the l fades into a soft glide or disappears, so ła góndoła (the gondola) sounds roughly like ea góndoea. Other areas pronounce a full l, and writing ł lets one spelling serve both. It is the same character as Polish ł (U+0142), only with a different sound, and many Venetians simply write l.

A hyphen separates s from a following soft c when they are said as two sounds, s + ch, rather than the sh of Italian sc: s-ciao, the old greeting that gave the world ciao, and s-ciopo (rifle). The apostrophe marks elision as in Italian: n’ombra (a small glass of wine), l’aqua.

Venetian accents: à é è ì ó ò ù and where they go

The accents mark the stressed syllable. As in Italian they appear on words stressed on the last syllable, such as bondì (good morning) and sità (city), but Venetian writing also marks words stressed on the third-to-last syllable, which Italian normally leaves bare: CLDR’s Venetian weekdays are luni, marti, mèrcore, zoba, vènare, sabo, doménega, and the boat is a góndoła.

For e and o the accent also tells the vowel’s quality. The grave marks an open vowel, è as in English bed and ò as in British lot; the acute marks a closed one, é close to the vowel of French été and ó close to the o of Italian sole. A, i and u have only one quality, so they take the grave: à ì ù. Capitals keep their accents: DOMÉNEGA, MÈRCORE.

How to type Venetian letters: à é è ó ò ù and ł

Windows: hold Alt and type on the number pad à 0224, è 0232, é 0233, ì 0236, ò 0242, ó 0243, ù 0249, and for capitals À 0192, È 0200, É 0201, Ì 0204, Ò 0210, Ó 0211, Ù 0217; « is 0171, » 0187 and € 0128. The letter ł has no Alt code of this kind: in Word type 0142 then Alt + X (Ł is 0141), or add the Polish (Programmers) keyboard, where AltGr + L gives ł. On the United States-International layout, ` then a vowel gives à è ì ò ù and ' then a vowel gives é ó. The Italian keyboard has keys for à è ì ò ù and é (Shift + è), but no ó.

Mac: hold the letter and pick from the pop-up (e gives è é, o gives ò ó), or press Option + ` for the grave and Option + E for the acute, then the vowel; for ł add the Polish Pro layout and press Option + L, or copy it. Phones: long-press the vowel for à é è ì ó ò ù and long-press l for ł on most keyboards. HTML: à è é ì ò ó ù, and ł / Ł for ł Ł. Or copy them straight from the grid on this page.

Where Venetian is spoken, and Venetian vs Italian

CLDR estimates about 1.4 million speakers; Ethnologue-based counts run higher, to about 3.8 million. Most live in Italy (about 790,000 in CLDR’s figures), in the Veneto and nearby parts of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trentino. The second home of Venetian is Brazil (about 530,000), where descendants of 19th-century emigrants in Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina speak Talian, a Venetian-based language with Lombard and Portuguese influence. Istro-Venetian is spoken along the Adriatic coast of Slovenia and Croatia (CLDR’s roughly 29,000-per-country figures are for Venetian overall, not specifically this variety), and in Mexico the town of Chipilo in Puebla, founded in 1882 by families from Segusino in the Veneto, still speaks it (about 2,500).

Is Venetian a language or an Italian dialect? Linguists treat it as a Romance language of its own, related to Italian but not descended from it, and its neighbours include Lombard, Ladin and Friulian; in everyday Italian it is usually called a dialect. The differences are easy to hear and to see: Venetian xe for Italian è, caxa for casa, grasie for grazie, zoba for giovedì, pan for pane. For the standard language see the Italian collection; for the neighbours, the Lombard, Ligurian and Piedmontese ones, and for the countries of Talian and Chipilo, Portuguese, Brazil, Spanish and Mexico.