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Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken as a native language by over two million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where of five million inhabitants almost all can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, Venezia Giulia, Istria and some towns of Dalmatia, an area of six to seven million people. The language is called 'vèneto' or 'vènet' in Venetian, 'veneto' in Italian; the variant spoken in Venice is called 'venexiàn/venesiàn' or 'veneziano', respectively. Although referred to as an Italian dialect (diałeto dialetto) even by its speakers, like other Italian dialects it is a sister language of the national language, not a variety or derivative of it. Venetan (and Venetian proper, the language of Venice) display structural and lexical differences from Italian. Typologically, Venetian is clearly distinct from the Romance languages spoken in North Western Italy, the Gallo-Italic languages. Neither Venetan nor Venetian should be confused with Venetic, an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken in the Veneto region around the 6th century BC. |