Venetian language
Venetian or Venetan (Venetian: vèneto, vènet or łéngua vèneta) is a Romance language spoken as a native language by almost four million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where most of the five million inhabitants can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, Venezia Giulia, Istria, and some towns of Dalmatia. Venetian is usually referred to as an Italian dialect although it is a Western Romance language, a different branch of Romance from that of Italian. Some authors include it among the Gallo-Italic languages, but by most authors, it is treated as separate. Typologically, Venetian has little in common with the Gallo-Italic languages of northwestern Italy, but shows some affinity to nearby Istriot.
Modern Venetian is not a close relative of the extinct Venetic language spoken in the Veneto region before Roman expansion, although both are Indo-European, and Venetic may have been an Italic language, like Latin, the ancestor of Venetian and most other languages of Italy. The earlier Venetic people gave their name to the city and region, which is why the modern language has a similar name.
